English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Theseus's amnesia and Crete between the Orient and Greece 0:00 The promise I didn't keep is that I had told you I would give you a summary, because we're reaching the end of a cycle, of what we've been doing for nearly two years now, under the title "Between Crisis and War: Philosophizing?" for anyone who might be lost in the meanders — though more and more people tell me they actually enjoy these detours. But don't push me too far either. Otherwise I'll end up like little Tom Thumb without pebbles in the forest. So, a small summary that lets us retrace a bit the main stages we've followed to get here.
0:37 This will be useful for those who've been kind enough to come from the beginning and who sometimes, in addition, feel lost. And also, all the more so, for newcomers, so as not to make them jump onto a moving train too abruptly. So I didn't have time to do it, given the density of the scene from Phèdre that we read together last time. So I'm going to take care of that today, the plan I'd already started, in fact. And otherwise, let me take the opportunity for just a little flashback, a little feedback on Theseus.
1:11 Yes, another promise I didn't keep, I had told you. Some of you may have caught it, to speak like the young people do. Nobody knows exactly what happened at the bottom of the labyrinth, face to face, between the Minotaur and Theseus. We know it ended badly for the Minotaur, that's for sure. But in any case, I had told you, since then — does anyone remember? — from that point on, what happens to Theseus?
1:43 From the moment he comes back up from the labyrinth, there's a change in his behavior. Yes, I was sure that hadn't been caught. Do you remember, maybe? It was two or three sessions ago. Yes, yes, yes. He's struck by amnesia. And I'd even say, recurring amnesia — you remember. Recurring. He starts by forgetting Ariadne on Naxos. Which is quite something, since it's thanks to Ariadne that we got out. And it's us this is all about.
2:14 You know very well, in myths, it's the collective poem, myth, isn't it? It's Ariadne who helped us not be devoured by the Minotaur, and helped us get out of the labyrinth after all. Woman, decidedly, the future, but also the past of man. And there you go, to thank her, he abandons her on the first island where they used to stop at the time to take on fresh water and continue sailing along the coast. They didn't sail out on the open sea back then, did they?
2:46 That couldn't have been far from the catastrophe that just happened with the plane, as we said, so all that, between Crete and... Yes. I told you the whole Cretan cycle is formidable. And there, I had marked that forgetting. It's the most famous one. Ariadne on the rocks, recounting her injustices. Imagine, there, hair disheveled before the deserted shore, Theseus's forgetful sails on the horizon, and her all alone on that island.
3:18 She doesn't yet know she's going to be consoled by Dionysus in person. Happy ending. But the second amnesia — I told you there was repetition, and I hadn't told you about this one yet, so now I'm keeping my promise — is that when he comes back victorious, imagine, he has freed the Greek people from the tribute they used to pay the Cretans, symbolized by the story of the Minotaur devouring fourteen young people every year, seven boys, seven girls, like that. This was the era when the Cretans and the Phoenicians, the "sea peoples" as the Romans called them, you know, on their frescoes, the sea peoples — very interesting.
3:53 For those interested, I should point out this is one of the probable origins of the Corsicans — that's what's said, I'm not indulging in fantasies about my own people, don't worry. Some say we invented writing, that we kindly passed it on afterward to the Babylonians. The Corsicans, well. The sea peoples, the Phoenicians, Cretans, the Phoenicians are today's Lebanese, they're the Philistines, they're the Palestinians, it's all that really, it's a heavy history, it's ancient.
4:24 They invented the book, paper — Byblos, it still exists in Lebanon, that's where the name comes from. Papyrus, the alphabet, maybe the greatest invention of Antiquity, the alphabet no less, it's Phoenician. Can you imagine if we still had to think everything in ideograms, with hieroglyphics — it's not simple. We'd already seen that there's no great mathematician in Roman history — when you look at Roman numerals, how could that produce great mathematicians? It's not a very flexible numbering system.
5:00 A writing system rather, because practically — I don't think there's even a word for it, numbering system. And so, this liberation from the Cretan yoke marks the start of Greek history, and the end of that hyphen, almost literally — look at the map of the eastern Mediterranean, and Crete is like a hyphen, bam, between the Orient and Greece. It's a bit of both, really both. There's still that somewhat hieratic, somewhat Egyptian side, there's still the cult of the bull, the Cretan bull, you see.
5:34 The Minotaur, that all revolves around the Minotaur, and then all those frescoes where you see the great game — never has any greater Spanish toreador dared what the Cretans did. The trick — the expression comes from this in French — was to take the bull by the horns and do a somersault over it, no less. That was the bull-leaping, that was the thing. Otherwise, there's this — you feel Egypt, which isn't far, but at the same time there's a smile that heralds the Greeks, that heralds the kouroi. There's a fresco found in Minoan art — now, I'm lingering a bit, because you're lucky enough to have the internet, type in Minoan culture images, and then look — the women have curly hair, they're brunettes, and there's one fresco, more than 2000 years old, that's called the Parisienne.
6:22 She's so well made-up, coquettish and cheerful, that they call her the Parisienne. That's not quite Egyptian hieratism. You see, it's really a cultural hyphen. Anyway. So that symbolizes all this, the destruction of the Minotaur and Theseus's emancipation. So when he comes back triumphant to his home in Athens, where his old father Aegeus is — who gave his name to what's now the Aegean Sea, and you'll see why he gave it his name — well, he forgets — does anyone remember?
Tristan and Theseus: the same mythic structure 6:53 What does he forget? Bravo, the sail. Since we're coming out of Tristan — since thanks to you, I should have started there — an immense thank you for the gift you gave me for my birthday, that seat for Tristan. I allowed myself to tell Romand, who oversaw the whole thing, the gift and the tickets, that I was going a bit reluctantly. I'm always very happy to go to a concert live, I prefer a mediocre orchestra live to the great immortal recordings I have in my record collection — that's not the point, of course.
7:31 But anyway, there you go, telling myself: it's been 30 years since there's been a great Wagnerian voice among the men, there's a total shortage. It was a dream evening, a Tristan like I hadn't seen in a long time. I think it's the best Tristan I've seen on stage, apart from maybe Nilsson back in the day. And the staging, the quality of the conducting — I won't dwell on it too much. Why am I telling you this? What are you going on about, jumping from one thing to another like this? We were in Crete, under Apollo's sun, and you're transporting us to the Iroise Sea, into the mist.
8:04 It's the same story. Tristan goes to fetch a woman on behalf of King Mark. On an island — not Crete, Ireland. He has to bring the Irish princess back to King Mark. It's a bit dated, they'll need a potion to make it work. Yes, that's it. And to do that he has to kill a monster, Tristan too, called the Morholt, if you know the poem of Tristan a bit. The Morholt, this monster, is Iseult's brother-in-law.
8:35 Think of Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship — the Minotaur is Ariadne's brother-in-law. It's diabolically precise, symbolism among peoples. The Minotaur is the son of Pasiphaë, the same mother as Ariadne and Phèdre, the wife of Minos, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë. We'll talk about Phèdre. Yes, she deceived Minos, her royal husband, with a bull. That's called hubris.
9:05 "O hatred of Venus, o fatal wrath, into what wild straying was my mother cast by love." At the time, everyone understood the allusion to Versailles. You can imagine. Who speaks of "straying" for a bull, really. That's what produced the Minotaur. And to hide this monstrous fruit — it's the case to say it — this hubris, this hybrid, this transgression of measure, he must not have had the face of the Apollo Belvedere, the Minotaur. No, I'm serious. This is not the Greek world.
9:35 It has to be hidden, it's shameful, the labyrinth to conceal this monstrosity. You see, it all holds together, really. It's a remnant of the Orient. The Egyptian statues of animal-headed men or man-headed animals. The Sphinx, or the human head emerging from the leonine body. Or conversely, Anubis, a human body with a jackal's head. You see, in the Orient, there's still this struggle between natural origin and the humanity that's in the process of emerging, until Oedipus speaks to the Sphinx — Sophocles' Oedipus.
10:07 So Sophocles' Sphinx, the Greeks' Sphinx, says the answer to all the Sphinx's riddles is man. What animal walks on four legs in the morning, three legs at noon, two legs in the evening? Well of course, it's man. As an aside, four legs in the morning is the baby we all once were. And before walking, two legs at noon, and then on a cane, in old age, in the evening, you see — what symbolism, you see, man bringing down the world of the gods soon after.
10:43 That's why Socrates was accused, why he was condemned — that he was teaching the youth to no longer believe in the world of the gods. Let's not forget, all this is very consistent. So, getting back, I was at Tristan — one of the parallels: going to an island, where there's the woman he loves, that's going to be Ariadne. For that, he has to kill a monster related to her, bearing the same relation, that of brother-in-law, of the passer-by.
11:14 And thirdly, the sail on the return. Tristan lies dying, desperately awaiting the ship with the white sail. Yes, well, Theseus — old Aegeus, his father, had told him: "If you make it out alive from the Minotaur, hoist the white sail." He forgets. From afar, his father sees the black sail and throws himself into the waters that now bear his name, the Aegean Sea. There you go. That was a promise I hadn't kept — to show you that Theseus's amnesia becomes repetitive.
The unconscious and the drive of repetition in Freud 11:45 What happened at the bottom of the labyrinth? And I had pointed out to you, since we entered Racine to illustrate the notion of the unconscious — let me remind you of the path we took to explore the modern subject — that it's a subject where there is not only thought, Descartes and extension, the body, but where there is, between the two, thoughts I do not think and wills I do not will. Now there, one could really lose one's Latin. It's neither thought, nor consciousness, nor the body, is it? It's to illustrate this, with flagrant cases so as not to remain in abstraction, in hasty modelizations, that I made this long detour through the poem.
12:26 A poem which has the advantage, through Racine, of being the expression of a great poet, while at the same time being an expression rooted in that poem of the people which is myth in general. That's not Racine. And it keeps going. This story keeps inspiring creators. There you go. So I had reminded you all the same of the link with Freud, this repetition. Let's not forget it's the repetition compulsion, for it's an irrepressible drive in Freud.
12:56 Wiederholung Zwang. Zwang in German means compulsive. You can't help it, the Zwang. It's more than Trieb. Trieb is the general drive. Zwang is the dominating drive. Wiederholung Zwang, the repetition compulsion. Alright, let me open a little parenthesis before returning to my plan. I say this because we don't have much time left. We have one session left until June, and these aren't things I'll regret later having skipped.
13:29 You know there are several "topics" as they're called in Freud, that is, several reorganizations of his system. I told you this is one of the aspects I like most about Freud. It's his side — contrary to what his most dogma-averse critics say — of constantly reworking his systematics. He's a man who came from positivism, from the biology of his time. So he's a man of experience. We forget this sometimes, we think he does arbitrary things. In fact, he saw 3000 times someone having an erection at the moment they had a dream of flying, among his subjects or patients.
14:03 It's not a disease to dream, so there's nothing wrong with his patients. So, to begin with, he has experimental data, and only afterward makes hypotheses that we'll call reckless if we like, but he has rich material. So, among all these reworked topics, he started with the metapsychology, the subconscious, he drops it, it becomes the unconscious, the preconscious, all that. And often he says, I say this as a hypothesis, I don't know where it will lead us, we'll see, it's just to try it out.
14:34 And then afterward he backtracks, he confirms or drops it. I rather like this somewhat opportunistic side, if you will, of the effort toward intelligibility. Especially on oceans no one had ever charted before. So you probably know, some of you certainly do, that in his last topic, the last state of his thought, the deepest one, comes in the famous death drive, which didn't exist until then and which comes to contradict the essence of what he'd thought until then. For him, there was the reality principle, the pleasure principle, fighting each other in each of us.
15:07 There's the pleasure principle, you can think of mating season in animals. I'm going to go get the female — I don't say the girl, the female. Men and women exist in history and culture. In nature, there are males and females. I say this because in this era when people talk about gender and all that, this nuance, never made, can be useful. Of course, since nowadays the fashion is to skip over everything that is human and to favor naturalism over culturalism — so I insist there are only men and women in culture and history. Otherwise, there are males and females.
15:37 So, when mating season comes — I'm going back to the animal world — there's the pleasure principle, yes, but it must reckon with the reality principle: it's the moment when mammals take the most risks. You know, even those used to hiding — safety, hiding, is very important for animals — it's the moment they take the most risks. So there you go, he was in that rather classical, positivist topic of his time. Same century as Darwin, even if a generation later, but still. And then all of a sudden, something becomes more important to him in the unconscious as a drive than pleasure: the death drive, no less.
The war of 1914 and the birth of the death drive 16:16 And how did this come to him — that's where I open a small parenthesis, very quickly — from the war of 1914. A carnage like that doesn't happen every day in history, and suddenly, alas, a civilization capable of committing this abomination proves capable of anything, when you see these signs — worse in the Aisne, in the Oise, I won't even mention the Somme — you see the number of crosses, twenty-year-old kids, the barbarity.
16:56 I say this because the horrors of the last war serve as a screen memory that obscures the horror of the first one. Do you see what I mean? And what's monstrous is that this erupts in a hyper-developed civilization — it's not barbarism, not barbarism in the sense of ignorance. As Voltaire says, in his letter to Rousseau, the greatest crimes have never been committed except by the greatly ignorant, from Thamas Kouli-Kan down to a customs clerk who knows only how to calculate, says Voltaire.
17:27 What an illusion to think that violence can only be due to ignorance, to the childhood of humanity. So there, 1914 — it's monstrous that a civilization did that. First line, second line, third line, the kids, 18-20 years old, as my friend Clouscard used to say — you know, I think he's the most decisive thinker of the postwar period, at least in the French language, I can't say I know them all. He used to tell me, with his Tarn accent, that they used the war to liquidate the twenty centuries of peasantry that had shaped us.
18:01 You see, that's not a stupid remark — it's a quip, but still. So there, I don't often bother you with Corsican-ness, you've noticed, or when I do talk about it, it's rather to be ironic, especially about today's Corsicans who put up signs telling French people to get out and, underneath, Arabs to get out. But there, one has to be fair — for those who know Corsica a bit, who go there on vacation, look at the war memorials, there are plenty of villages where there are more dead listed on the memorial than there are living people in the village.
18:32 It's the department with the highest number of dead per capita from the 1914 war — that's why I bring it up. Because it was planned that way — the shepherd departments, the Moroccans, the Corsicans, and so on, were sent to the front line. That's how armies are managed. So, this slaughter. So, Freud is a contemporary of this. And suddenly, in his consulting room, where he used to find — bourgeois neurosis, hysteria, that had its big problems. In Vienna, I don't know, you know — Klimt, Pentheus, Vienna, Mahler, bourgeois neurosis — I love Mahler, that doesn't mean I said something I didn't say.
19:05 But as Clouscard also used to say, for the same grief, a son of a good family will develop a neurosis, whereas the worker will develop a psychosis. The worker, when day breaks, you know the film, I don't remember, he'll go shoot someone, or he'll kill himself, whereas the other will go treat his depression in the Bahamas. I say the Bahamas, or Corsica, or now it's Croatia, Prague.
19:37 So there, suddenly, in his consulting room, a change in his clientele, I mean — it's the war traumatized who parade through. And he notices, he says, a curious recurring element: very different people, in terms of profile, they hadn't had the same fate, hadn't had the same childhood — is that they all kept coming back to the circumstances that had immediately preceded the trauma. One had been exposed on a grenade, another had seen, I don't know, his best friend, guts hanging out, whatever — there's no shortage of choice in this carnage.
20:13 You can well imagine, in matters of trauma. And he noted that all of them, their drive — well, we're far from the pleasure principle here — was to relive the most unpleasant moment of my life, quite the opposite, you see. It's interesting where Freud started from. Anyone who's had a car accident and such knows this tendency a bit, to want to relive the last moments before the accident, I don't know, even if it means breaking into a sweat, etc. There's a very beautiful film, since I'm speaking in front of film connoisseurs, correct me — a very beautiful film by Mankiewicz called Suddenly, Last Summer, which I warmly recommend to you regarding the treatment of trauma, of trauma, excuse me, for its absurdity, on screen.
20:56 I don't know if — I recommend it to you, Liz Taylor is only 17, she's still brunette, she's not yet "Liz Taylor," she acts wonderfully, she's well directed, but she's overshadowed by Katharine Hepburn who does an extraordinary turn, and Montgomery Clift, who was my wife's favorite actor — but that's an anecdote. Well yes, well yes, I did know Chet Baker before knowing myself, so I'm forced to know myself, before knowing myself. And you'll see how a trauma, the difficulty there is in reliving it — anyway, there's the screen that blocks memory like that, we started from Chet Baker, memory problem.
The Kantian plan and the example of the origins of jazz 21:39 And there you have it, so I'm closing the parenthesis on the repetition principle, but I absolutely wanted to keep my promise. I had promised you the outline, the outline is done, I'm joking, but only half. I mean by that it's a fine illustration of the abstract-concrete relation. You just need to divide all this up and you have everything we've done so far. I'll do it, I'll do it. But there you go, there's an introduction, well what is philosophy, that's what's called philo-philosophy.
22:11 There's one more definition, with all the philosophers going on about it, you see. And then afterward, thank you Kant, who did a great service to those who teach or learn philosophy, that it all comes down to two questions — well, there are three actually. What can I know? That covers knowledge, methodology, logic, epistemology, whatever you like, there. And then, what must I do covers morality, action, politics, law, the relation to things, the relation to the other — we'll come back to that — but this is just to tell you, there, it lets us frame things, it's a bit abstract, you realize, I'm skimming over a whole bunch of problems that would each deserve ten sessions.
22:47 So, we're going to go into some detail. First the introduction, I'm taking it up again here, tell me if you can't see anything, I'll write a bit bigger. The introduction, yes, in the introduction, I had started by proposing the nature and origin of all these commonplaces of philosophy.
23:19 There you go. So, nature, of course, in the sense of definition of meanings, what is proper to it, what is specific to the nature of the triangle, that the sum of its angles equals two right angles, that has nothing to do with naturalistic nature. There you go. Naturalistic — but I like putting it that way because it already raises a problem, doesn't it? If we don't know the definition, how could we grasp its origin? Chronological order depends on logical order here.
23:50 You see what I mean. What are the origins of jazz? You're going to understand what I mean. You could look in the jungles of central Congo. That would be the wrong track. Sometimes you go back too far. I say this because there are fewer jazz clubs on the African continent than in the single city of Tokyo. Listen carefully to what I wanted to say. And having worked in the field of music in Africa, I've formed something of an opinion on the question. That there would never have been jazz without the contribution of Africans, and in particular the imported slaves, is more than obvious.
24:24 It's not obvious — that's true. We've already agreed that within the obvious there is 'video' [seeing], and that truth, certainty, is far from truth. But had there been only that, there would not have been jazz either if there had been only Africa. Jazz, like all great cultural phenomena, is something pure — extraordinarily impure. It's a mixture of contributions coming from various sources, for example the English song, that is, the tune, the standard, the hit, which most of the time comes from the Broadway musical.
25:03 The three great names, Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers, etc. Some tunes the whole world knows, from overtures and so on. The musical comedy, whether first on the Broadway stage or later in film, the Fred Astaires and so on, are the breeding ground for all the themes that would become standards. I won't list them because there are so many, but they are extremely well known.
25:36 Now, all these standards have the AABA structure. That's why I mention it. This one, you see? This one owes nothing to Africa. Europe — it's an old thing. 'Au clair de la lune' and its structure. You see? When you sing 'Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot,' that's melody A. Then whatever you call it, the words change but the melody stays the same. Agreed? So that's also A. 'Ma chandelle est morte' — there the melody changes. That's B, also called in English the bridge, or middle part.
26:07 Because it's in the middle. And bridge, because it makes the connection between A and A. You just have to look closely. It's very simple. 'Ouvre-moi ta porte, au clair de la lune' — ah, that's it, that thing. I'm telling you this because I'm showing you the cultural unconscious, which has nothing to do with the sexual unconscious here. The unconscious that comes from history, from culture. I mean by that: when people say Black people have the blues in their blood — well, the rhythm — no, I say this because we mustn't be alienating either, even when it's apparently laudatory and admiring.
26:40 It's not — it's also alienating. They don't have it in their blood, they have something better than that, they have it in the code. I won't stray too far into this, but I mean, there's a pentatonic scale in Africa that predisposes toward the blues. We could come back to that, but it's not my subject. What I want to show here is that we all have something, not in our blood, but in our culture. And we're so immersed in it that we can no longer take any distance from it. When we listen to 'Au clair de la lune' we think we have a virgin ear — not at all.
27:10 We have that structure that makes us expect the repetition, the thing, the change at the same spot each time. That's what I mean. And since there are millions of tunes composed on this structure, in jazz, broadly speaking, the whole set of jazz themes comes down to two melodic structures, that one and the blues structure. You see, that's interesting to know. There. It's not my subject, I won't dwell on it, but it's to show you that if you go back beyond a certain chronological threshold, you're no longer in jazz. You're in one of the streams that made up the great river of jazz.
27:44 You see what I mean? But after all, when you have a little trickle running between your legs up in the Alps, at the source of some river, that's not what... you wouldn't call that the Amazon or the Mississippi. You see? This is important, what we're saying here. What I'm saying, as a philosopher, is that like all these rich things, jazz is an always-already complex thing. That's an interesting formula — always already. There is no pure origin, not even in the African jungles. There you go.
28:15 And so, likewise for philosophy — you have to know its definition. Otherwise you'll confuse it with the history of thought. In that case, Hindu thought, Chinese thought — I mean, why do we make it start with Socrates? You see? That's arbitrary. These are reminders I'm giving for the introduction. There you go. So that's why I had specified nature and origin. And I had established a threshold. This is a summary, not a detailed rehash. Precisely, it's the trendy 'rupture,' as the structuralists call it, it's the break.
The Socratic cut: "what do you call...?" 28:52 That's it, the break. No, it's not him, it's Bachelard, it's the epistemological break. So, we're going to talk about the Socratic break to wrap things up. There you go. The Socratic break lies entirely in the fact that the object of my inquiry is now the word, and no longer the thing.
29:23 That's where I insisted, I still can't get over it. And this, I will write down. This break, I sum it up in this distinction: the fundamental question is no longer 'what is it,' because that's a question we've been asking since the beginning of humanity, isn't it? There are answers. There's a dizzying depth when you read the Bhagavad Gita or Taoism. I mean, careful — I'm not reducing anything. I'm saying: this is not philosophy, it's thought, it's religion, whatever you want to call it, but it's not the former. 'What is,' isn't it, and what we've distinguished from what Socrates inaugurates, is 'what do you call...,' which is quite different.
30:05 We're nearing the end of the introduction, once we've crossed that threshold. We start to see what's specific to philosophy. It doesn't look like much, but I had made this little diagram, which I won't redo here, isn't it — it's not an astrologer of antiquity, a Chaldean magus for instance, climbing up a ziggurat, a kind of tower — it's not that there was a Babel, a Babylon. And Babylon rises gigantic in the shadow of ruined Babel. As if, twenty meters above the ground, you'd see better the size of Jupiter, or the magnitude of the star Antares.
30:43 No, but, well, that's not empiricism — astrology counted for more than astronomy, but in any case, the question everyone asks is: what is the sun, is it a god, is it this or that, etc. I don't yet know whether it's a star or a planet, but still, those are questions. But 'what is' — being is given, the question isn't really radical, there's already something given, which is being. Whereas here, it's more radical. Here, it's someone who has no direct dealings with the sun, but with you, with me, with him — that is, with someone who speaks about the sun and who is asked: but what do you call the sun?
31:19 Once you've told me what you call the sun, I'll tell you whether it's a star, a planet, etc., you'll see. Is it that thing which is so pleasant, which warms you in winter? You who are German, you'll see why I say this, I alluded to it last time, because in German, the sun is said in the feminine, quite simply. How could one not feel tenderness for this thing which, when it's minus 15 degrees, comes to warm you up? There you go, in German they say 'der Mond' [the moon, masculine], 'die Sonne' [the sun, feminine].
31:49 Die Sonne. And, there you go, not to mention the blond color of hair — well, one might connote — not 'might,' all poetry plays on this, the blond of wheat fields, remember in The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry, when the fox says to the Little Prince, 'I will always think of you because of the color of the wheat, which is the color of your hair.' You remember? You see, I'm not inventing anything. But wait, that's not the astronomer's sun. On the other hand, that sun also exists. And since Neanderthal times, or whatever you like, it is no less real than the other one.
32:21 There you go, careful. So, 'what do you call...' — a radical question, and we've seen that this distinction is so far from secondary that it governs everything that follows. Namely, that here I have an astrologer facing a heavenly body, that is, a speaking being facing a mute star, which will not say to him, 'Ah, no, I'm not a star, I'm only a planet.' No. I forgot, he says 'this sun.' It's the other way around — if only you could speak. Whereas there, at the foot of the tower or ziggurat, isn't it, we have a little bearded man, a stock image, a Socratic philosopher, who addresses not the sun but the astrologer, and says to him: what do you call the sun?
33:05 That is, a speaking being addressing another who can answer him. Hello Thomas. Who can answer him. You see how dizzying the difference is. The more you study it, the more you dig into it, the more you see what's at stake. So, again: this bears on things, that bears on words. And that's where philosophy begins. It's when the questioning bears on the mediation itself. That mediation through which man relates to the world.
33:35 Man, who is the logos itself existing, said Hegel. Man is the logos itself existing. Because there are logoi, as in Plato, that are sometimes in the kosmos noetos, in the intelligible world, isn't it, which are essence but which lack a bit of existence. Philosophers will understand me well. Whereas here, twice, there's this formula — sorry, excuse me — and the concept, or there, there was the same, that one sees. And the concept itself existing — he said it of man, to define man, and of time.
34:07 It's interesting that Hegel used the same predicate — as one would say in logic, à la Wittgenstein — for two subjects apparently as independent as man and time. In both cases, we're dealing with the concept itself existing, not just in my head. There, I'll close the parenthesis. So here, the questioning bears on words. And, moving on, I told you we keep seeing that the stakes grow in importance roughly in proportion to how deeply we dig.
34:39 If the question bears on language — language is what unites us. The community of men, isn't it — not just within one people, that's the language proper, but the wider language, since languages are all translatable into one another. Let me remind you, linguists have worked quite a bit on this — language, the system of communication common to humanity, that's its extension. The tongue, much more restricted, isn't it, the communication system tied to a community — I don't say a people, because the Chadians are part of Francophone Africa and of the East, they are not part of a more extensive teaching.
35:15 There you go, Francophonie. We're made of Amiens, and then, they were of Amiens, the ancients. There, so, and then, the individual, humanity, a people, the individual, speech, language, the tongue, speech. Right, Thomas? Neither Thomas, nor I, nor Alyosha, we don't have the same speech. We all have our verbal tics, our accents, our vocabularies, our recurrences, our slightly recurrent phrasings, there.
35:49 Moreover, speech is truly the singular moment, the moment when language finally enters existence. Because the tongue exists as little as the highway code. It's not the highway code — it exists on paper, but nobody drives exactly according to the highway code. You always drift a little over the yellow line, there's a tractor — likewise for the tongue, we always make small grammatical mistakes. There you go. That's interesting, isn't it. The more we dig, the more we realize this nearly deserved Socrates' death sentence.
Socrates sows discord: community and the universal 36:24 I'm serious, you see, there's a great deal at stake. Do you realize, he calls into question what binds us together, really. Me, I'm for Socrates. Imagine, he's the patron saint, like Saint Christopher for drivers, for... I'm getting carried away, I'll do like Talleyrand. They asked him, how can an enlightened man like you, in the age of the Enlightenment, believe in God? He answered: first of all, because I am the Bishop of Autun. There you go. No, seriously, it's true that he sows discord.
36:56 He sows discord because he starts casting doubt, and he's going to say to Hollande: what do you call democracy? Faceless finance. You know, Hollande fights against faceless finance and against barbarism, against terrorism, and at the same time he gives the Legion of Honor to the Saudis. What do you call terrorism? Who is 'the terrorist'? You see, these are terrible questions.
37:26 We understand that the Athenians — you understand — and on top of that, there are young people listening to him, that's all it took. So the accusation isn't entirely false. It's unfounded in law, morally, for me, but it's not false. In fact it's true that he teaches people no longer to respect the gods of the city — if the gods are Hollande, Onfray, Soral a little, that's a bit unfair. But still, all the more popular.
37:57 And in the rising Europe, he's not the only one. Look over at Austria. It's tomorrow, isn't it? What vote for the president? Sunday. OK. Let me open a small parenthesis. You know, we can no longer talk about, denounce the return of fascism, because some American found it amusing and coined 'Godwin's point,' and that's it. You see? The point — within 15 seconds he's already talked about fascism. That means conspiracy theories want fascism. It's extraordinary.
38:27 We waited for the very era when fascism is returning everywhere to forbid talking about it. I'll close the parenthesis — between crisis and war. There you go. We dig deeper and we realize that Socrates, suddenly, does the irreparable. That is, he turns the question onto what makes us a community together. He'd had enough of communities. Me too. I'm Corsican, I'm fed up with communities.
38:57 Once, there was a guy building his villa. It was fairly new. He'd put in poplars — well, he'd planted poplars because they grow fairly fast, apparently, there, to get some shade. In Corsica, that's important. And along comes an autonomist with a shaved head, an ayatollah-style beard, military fatigues — I say this because they're painted as leftists, progressives against the Jacobin state, you know, against Parisian arbitrariness. He says, why are you planting that, that's not from here?
39:28 So I told him, since I was there, that he should also uproot all the olive trees, because it was the Greeks who brought the olive tree to Corsica. There you go. That's communities for you. What can you do? It's terrible. And me, I prefer societies to communities. Socrates preferred the city, over the metic on one side, or the Theban on the other, isn't it. He was for the universal. That's what I'm saying. One of the most fought-against notions nowadays, as you know, especially since May '68.
40:00 I have nothing against June '68, and the tripling of the minimum wage, all that, I'm for it, mind you — rights in the workplace, etc. But there are two '68s, as you know. One of them won out on television sets. It's not June, it's May. It's Cohn-Bendit. Libertarian in '68 and liberal in '78. He's the one who said it, not me. Well. Perversion of words. You see?
Critique and crisis; a reading of Émile 40:30 Attacking that is a big deal on Socrates' part. And here I'll make a small nuance, I don't want to go into too much detail because this is a summary, but I posed it as a problem, remember? Is it Socrates who introduces discord into the city? Which is what I seem to have been saying for a while now. Or is it, not in-depth — and now I'm saying the opposite — because there was already crisis in the city that Socrates spread through the streets and started asking questions. Is it critique that produces crisis, or is it the state of crisis that encourages laying things bare, as we do among ourselves each time we get together, and I'm sure we wouldn't be in this workshop if we weren't in a state of crisis.
41:10 This workshop wouldn't have the same interest, and some people wouldn't come, or wouldn't do philosophy. We'd need something else. Maybe bullfights. I have nothing against it, nothing for it. There you go. So it's a question worth asking. It was set as a topic for the philosophy agrégation exam some twenty years ago. It was titled: Critique and Crisis, how to conceive their relation? I even remember someone who walked out within the first seconds with a blank paper, because they wondered: crisis of what, critique of what.
41:44 In philosophy we have — it could be a nervous breakdown, a toothache crisis, it could be the Middle East crisis. There you go. We are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions. Who said that? That's a sly little smile, as if you knew. No, but I do know. I know, but I can just see it. I can't remember. You're kind. You don't want to — you want the newcomers to look for it. That's nice of you. You could have played it smart, could have shown off. But... suddenly I tried, I got it wrong.
42:15 There you go. Tell us. Bravo. If anyone was ever not a prophet — because saying that in 1770, you know, in Émile, when he's trying to persuade Émile's mother, who has gone off on... that's the point, that's what I'll also do in this staging. And so there are no more prejudices except of mediocrity. He must follow a manual trade. He's in no hurry. Bravo. He's approaching ten years old. It's time he took up a manual trade. Already, the nobles didn't work. Not even a bit of trade — but a manual trade, no.
42:47 A trade for my son, my son a craftsman, sir, how could you think of it! I think of it better than you do, madam, who never wanted to make of him anything but a marquis, a lord, a prince, and perhaps one day less than nothing. I wanted to make him a man. Rousseau's great texts are worth rereading regularly. It's a very great text. And whatever you may say to Madame, to make of him a man, he will have fewer equals in that title than in all those he holds before him.
43:19 Because it proves that for Rousseau, man is not an empirical notion. It doesn't just fall from the sky. So, and he insists, and he explains why. He begins by giving practical reasons. And many aristocrats who heard this were well advised. Many, having emigrated to England at the Revolution, were quite glad to have a trade — carpentry, or locksmithing — to earn their living, etc. I mention this in passing. And the first argument Rousseau finds is this: we are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions. Who can answer for what you will become then?
43:49 The great man becomes small, the monarch becomes a subject. 'Are the blows of fate so rare that you could count on being exempt from them?' Let people admire as much as they like this defeated king who wants to bury himself in fury under the debris of his throne — as for me, I despise him. I see that he is great only by his crown, and that he is nothing if he is not king. But he who loses it and can do without it is then above it. From the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, a fool, can fill as well as anyone else, he rises to the state of man, which so few men know how to fulfill.
44:22 We see once again, you see, that the notion of humanity is not simply a given where it's enough to be born a man in order to be a man. I think that so few men know how to fulfill it. We are born animal, and we spend a lifetime trying to become human. Not on our own. We have an education, a culture, and an inheritance at the start that gives us a leg up.
The accursed triangle: humanity, universal, progress 44:52 I mention all this because all of it has been fought against. There's an accursed triangle that postmodern thought, well, the dominant, contemporary thought, hammers away at relentlessly. When I say dominant, I mean it in every sense, including in the sense of the thinking of the part of the world that dominates the rest of the world. Quite simply. And not just the most widespread. Namely, this triangle is man, the universal, humanity—I prefer to say "humanity" otherwise you'll think of the guy. Humanity, the universal, and progress.
45:23 What are the three most outdated notions since '68? Since Cohn-Bendit, since Foucault, Deleuze, you know, and Derrida. It's interesting. It's curious, actually. I'll just cite Foucault, one of his most famous formulas: man is a recent invention, and one which, fortunately, we are about to soon get rid of. I'm not distorting his thought too much. Sorry? The death of man. The death of man, there you go, you know it well.
45:54 And yes, because there had been the death of God with Nietzsche. Modern thought likes to pile up corpses. But no, I'm not saying that. No, but wait, wait, I claim allegiance to Hegel, one must pass through death. No, no, wait, still, when it liquidated metaphysics—well, the Enlightenment century proclaimed the death of metaphysics. It's an interesting problematic. Philosophy. Socrates guilty, all the same, he bears death.
46:29 Nietzsche announces the death of God. Foucault, the death of man. That's interesting. Now we speak of the death of gender. Being about to move on to transgender. There you go. Interesting to notice these symmetries. Of course, the death of philosophy, periodically. What do we need philosophy for now that it's cognitive science, all that stuff, stimulus, reflexes, pheromones, brain imaging.
47:01 What are you going to bother studying Aristotle, Plotinus for, my poor fellow. Yes, there are misunderstandings like that. There are those who think it's about the same object. I can't help it. That philosophy should be at the CNRS, no doubt. There you go. I don't say this with contempt. I studied the behavior of rats in mazes myself when I was in the psychology option, when I did my philosophy degree, experimental psychology all the same. To study the soul, we study the body of rats.
47:34 It's useful, I remember, it's very interesting. I'll cite you one about rats that struck me. Actually, it was to show the sexual inhibition of male rats when you pass the smell of other male rats through their cage. It's interesting. It means it's measurable. There's an inhibition that occurs. There are others who are ready to go. Good, the species is reproduced. They no longer need me. Which reminds us in passing—it's not exactly cunning, but this cunning of sexuality that makes us believe it serves our pleasure when it actually serves the species.
48:08 It's not there for the individual. In nature, I'm not talking about eros, that's a cultural creation, love, à la Tristan. No, but sexuality in nature is made for the species. The proof, moreover, is that individuals, as I said earlier, that's when they take the most risks in the animal world. Fatal risks. So this rat, when they wired it up, they'd put little electrodes—these poor little rats, you see. And they gave it a pulse, I don't know how you produce a pulse, an excitation, on the kidneys, the little electrode, and when it felt it, it stopped running, it went back, all the way to the spot where the electric pulse had occurred, there, you see, as if it were tied to a place.
48:54 There you go, I'll close that parenthesis, it's amusing. So, I have no contempt for any of that, all of it is quite useful, and bodies do need to be cared for, for medicine, that's important, because I didn't say we have no relation at all to the animal, and that we'd be creating nothing but that. I said it's a bit reductive to talk about man starting from a model that's only valid for the animal. There you go. So, all that, drawn from the difference you're calling—what is it?
The philosopher between the mathematician and the poet 49:25 Do you realize? It was enough to question what Mallarmé magnificently calls, in a poem, the words of the tribe. And here I'm really getting close to the end of my introduction, since I had said the philosopher, if you want to position him as specific, must be placed within the genus of those who reflect on language, and there we have the genus, we don't yet have the species "philosopher," because there he's in competition with two others at opposite extremes: the mathematician, the scientist in general, the mathematician in particular, and at the other extreme, the poet, of whom Mallarmé says that the poet's function is, I quote, "to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe."
50:09 In "The Tomb of Edgar Poe," if you want to find the source: "As into himself at last eternity changes him"—actually, he's describing the statue of Edgar Poe in Baltimore, that somewhat bombastic statue where you see a guy with a bare sword on a rock, a pedestal. "As into himself at last eternity changes him, the poet arouses with a naked sword his century"—that's America. "His century, terrified at not having known that death triumphed in this strange voice."
50:39 America doesn't like death. Hollywood. Not that kind of death. "They, like a vile writhing of a hydra once hearing the angel" — "To give a purer sense to the words of the tribe."
51:09 "Proclaimed very loudly the spell drunk in the dishonorable flood of some dark mixture." Meaning, implicitly, that Mr. Poe's poetry is nothing but a drunkard's ramblings. It's true he was rather... he'd be found in the gutter. But there you go. Reducing, nonetheless, the poetry of one who is inspired—isn't that so, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry and so many others—to drunkenness, to boozing. That's a bit much. There you go. To give a purer sense to the words of the tribe. Now we're starting to see the philosopher almost finishing our...
51:41 Almost. Something essential is missing. I'll finish the introduction. So, if you want a dotted line running through this whole plan, that's it. It's the... it's words. I put little Tom Thumb here to excite you a bit. If you want a dotted thread running through my whole workshop, we think we're talking about, I don't know, war, violence, sexuality, politics.
Know thyself and the notion of freedom 52:18 but actually, the guiding thread is reflection on words. We're in philosophy. There you go. A few subjects we address. So, there we are, right in the thick of it. And we're still missing something to finish the introduction. Is there, among the ancients, someone who sees an enormous notion, which I haven't spoken of so far, and without which we cannot close the introduction? We cannot begin the first part. We cannot begin philosophy. And I haven't brought it in yet.
52:53 You know how this is going to connect. It's going to connect with the first part, "What can I know." It's in the plan. Do you agree? But what can I know, exactly? How many grains of sand are there in the Sahara? Agreed? There you go. Me too, how many drops of water in the Pacific Ocean. Oh, there must be a determinate number. When we seek knowledge, it's not just anything, it's not everything. You see there's a selection. For the philosopher, which knowledge matters most to him among all knowledge?
53:23 There were two ways of answering, but they're linked. Ah well then, the ancients, well still, there are young people waiting for you. Well, the young ones, the newcomers. Sorry? I didn't hear. Fine. First answer. Ah well wait, the astronomer, he seeks to know, right? The trajectory of the comet, the brightness, the magnitude of such a star, etc. Its distance.
53:54 Things, the outside world, whereas—and Socrates insisted heavily on this, Socrates, mind you, since Socrates didn't write—insisted that his patron is the oracle of Delphi, because for the Greeks that was the navel of the world. You'd consult the oracle as soon as you had a problem. But the trouble was, it never answered the question asked. He says that he asked questions about temples, about their origins and so on. It says, you, you must be joking, you must be kidding, same thing.
54:24 Well, so, it was written, nonetheless, at the entrance of the sanctuary: gnothi seauton, know thyself. It's like the return of the tennis racket, you see, the ball, from the questioner's own throat. You seek to know what the moon is, what the stars are, what the cosmos is, what hydrogen is, etc., and its atomic composition—know thyself. There's a return to oneself, moreover, you see, a return to sender, which is typical. Yes, first answer.
54:56 But that's not enough, although it's linked. There's an even more important notion than that of the self, of identity, and of the subject. You know, science-philosophy, it's important, but fine. First distinction, it's not just any old thing. We're not going to move on, after the introduction, to "what can I know" in general by turning toward the horizon, saying, hey, what if I started by finding out how many leaves there are on that tree over there? Why not? That's knowledge too, after all. But we're going to privilege certain questionings over others. This one: knowing oneself.
55:28 You understand why we've only very recently come, in the last week, in the last months, to talk about the unconscious, etc. Ah well yes, you see, it's more important. Something without which... yes? Not the human, but it's linked, there will be no humanity without this. What is—you're going to find it—the notion without which philosophy is impossible? It's starting to come. Finality? Sorry?
55:58 Finality. I'm looking for a notion. We're getting closer. Hot, hot. It's a notion that's implied in all the ones you just mentioned. It's not complicated, but it crowns them all. All these notions—will, finality, a goal, a subject, a self—would not be possible. These notions, I'm being rigorous, like a logician, would not be possible if it weren't presupposed. What? Action, yes, action, but that's not what I'm looking for.
56:30 Action, but precisely, since we're on action. Do you remember my story about the wind that shakes the trees? I tell myself it's a metaphor. The wind is more active than the trembling of the trees from a strictly scientific point of view. But even the tree's movement is an effect, going to be forced by causality, you know? And we get the impression that it's inert, whereas the wind is like a character, a bit like in painters, you know, in Botticelli's Primavera, you see Aeolus, the divinity, doing his thing.
57:01 So the wind being the cause, the tree would be active—I don't know—and the trees would be passive—not at all, from a physical point of view that makes no sense, except as the metaphor I'm making. Nothing can be active except what is supposed to be free, thank you. What is not determined, what is not the effect of a prior cause, what is free. It's a principial causality—I take the word "principle" in the double sense of motor, and at the same time of beginning, of origin.
57:35 There we are. How, when I ask the question "what must I do," what use is it to ask it, if the final answer we'll get at the end of the big section "what can I know" is: my friend, what you must know is that you're completely determined, so you can't change the state of the world you're in, neither you nor anyone else, because everything is determined, it's all illusions, a story—"acting" doesn't exist, there's no freedom. Isn't that what Lordon says?
Lordon, Spinoza and freedom as postulate 58:05 Well, I don't know, do you listen to him from time to time? Ah there you go. No, I'm not repudiating the politician Lordon, there are positions I might hold against him, on the European treaty and all that, fine, I know that, but the problem is, what bothers me is that they meddle in philosophy. In any case, I can't—no, it's some kind of staircase trick with the card, no, in fact, no, by right, no, I can't, at least as much as men have some of Hegel's beauties.
58:37 But, you said something, I'm very worried, you said, because of France which isn't a happy hour, you know, often people say, ah, so, I cheer myself up, tell me, it's certainly like that, to dissuade, if I don't want, I don't want, that's a good question, yes, because, but, no doubt, when you tell Africans that money buys happiness, they answer, that's so cute, that's very relevant, it's so cute, to give me Africa's agreement, like Herodotus said, Africa will always astonish, there you go, so it's not the monopoly of philosophers, no, philosophy, is it a quality—there's no quality at that level, but Lordon fancies himself a philosopher, fine, except he picks a philosophy, and I'm not just thinking of Spinoza—he claims Spinoza—but good grief, to amputate the Ethics of the whole part on human freedom, he spends his time saying human freedom, I'm following his thread, is an illusion, it's nonsense, man is not an empire within an empire—he treats Spinoza this way to say that.
59:47 Of course, Spinoza spent his life demystifying the illusory forms of freedom that we all start out with, which are the same little illusions. Leibniz has the same ethics as Spinoza, the two titans, classic post-Cartesian philosophy as they say. Leibniz himself said that if the compass needle were endowed with consciousness, it would have the illusion of thinking that it wants to point north—you see, the will, it's interesting. There you go, if it's for that kind of freedom, it needs to be demystified. Spinoza is right about that, but Spinoza concludes that men believe themselves free because they have appetites—that's appetition, determination, appetite, it's indeed the naturalist connotation—they have appetites, understood as an endless chain for the Epicureans; they have appetites and they are ignorant of the causes that determine them, that determine this appetite. Of course, yes, so when one feels an appetite but it's not a determined question, one has the illusion of that freedom, the Vico thing, etc.
1:00:44 That's all very well, but he does say that the sage is the one who can know, can know himself, precisely know the determinations that move him, and as this intellection unfolds, this effort to know what makes me not free, I become that much more free each time—that's it. That, Lordon never talks about it. There you go, I'm making a rather long, rather labored parenthesis to point out that it's not just Lordon—there's a relentlessness, particularly in cognitive science, in wanting to persuade us, isn't there, that all culturalism is vain, that in fact we're all just effects of stimulus-response, you're going back to last century's positivism, it's all just wasted time, that's the future—no but frankly, when it's Monsieur Prudhomme, it's Monsieur Prudhomme who says "that's my opinion and I share it"—so there you go, and I haven't settled the debate, how could I settle such an important issue, I haven't told you I have good news for you, we're free and not determined, I haven't said the opposite either. I said, and I maintain, and it's an established acquisition of philosophy clearly formulated since Kant—
1:01:54 so we must remember this well, so I'll formulate it Kant's way because Kant is precise, technical, German. Freedom is a postulate of practical reason—that's what Kant says. So let's translate into French what a postulate is: it's something you have to presuppose for the rest to be valid. That's it. Now, I'm not at all sure it's true, but if it's not true, everything else collapses. It's that simple. So I keep what Kant said, which remains valid even today, at the moment I'm speaking: if there's no freedom, there's no point continuing this workshop, guys. No but it's true, once again, what's the point of asking "what must I do," isn't it, if we are made this way—it serves no purpose, because if by some miracle I manage to find wisdom and know what I must do, I won't be able to do it, because I have a determination that will make me do something else—go eat a pissaladière, for instance, you know, in Nice, the pissaladière, it's really good, it's not a pizza, it's with caramelized onions—there, that's where I crack, for instance, the drives, there you go, that's the reminder, and there we've finished the introduction.
1:03:05 once we've understood this, isn't it, that philosophy implies—careful, I have to be honest, I didn't say that freedom exists, because then Kant would criticize me for confusing non-contradiction with existence, you see—no, no, I mean that we now know, it's clearer for those who've followed from the start, you see, at the beginning it's too abstract, it can't be as clear as after the effort we've made together—that throughout "what can I know" we now know that what we're seeking to know is whether we are free or determined. That's the fundamental question. The rest is pretexts—whether it's empiricism, determinism, rationalism, we'll see the different schools later, isn't it, of knowledge—but each time what will be decisive in our choice, as philosophers, in our journey, in our Noah's ark, we haven't fled the flood to land on just any shore—if it's to land on a shore of servitude, we need to land on a shore where we can plant something.
1:04:15 What? What does Noah do as soon as he arrives? What does he plant? Well, grapes—not bad—and saying the fruit of the vine gladdens the heart of man. Isn't that beautiful? 2000 years later Baudelaire will say in a famous poem: one must always be drunk, everything lies there, on wine, poetry, or virtue, as you like, but one must always be drunk. The fruit of the vine, laetificat, gladdens the heart of man. It's beautiful. We're not in today's puritanism—it's not that it claims to liberate, it's one of the most sadly puritan things I've ever seen, it's no accident, it's a puritan culture that has dominated the world for some time now, hasn't it?
Historical conditions of freedom, against culturalism 1:05:00 Puritan cultures, what do we call that? WASP? White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. To come back to your question, Romain, it's the parallel between the Germanic world and the world of a certain American settlement, to which it would be unfair to reduce America—Charlie Parker, that's certainly not that. There you go, so the introduction is finished, on several counts. First, because we've understood the mutual implication of philosophy and freedom, and here I come back a bit to Socrates to illustrate, to show that it's concrete—when I speak of freedom, it's that the question couldn't have been asked under Pharaoh, the Socratic question, you see what I mean—what do you want to ask, what must I do, while everyone is building the pyramid on the construction site, only you don't know what needs to be done here, what we must do—that already presupposes a certain degree of freedom, the same circle as before, it wasn't Socrates who brought freedom into the city—to avoid further illusions, let's stay Marxian, I don't say Marxist, on purpose, to open the debate, not to close it—but let's stay Marxian: it's not consciousness that determines social being,
1:06:10 it's their social being that determines their consciousness. We see it clearly here: a historical moment was needed, a people among whom there was a certain margin of freedom, for this kind of questioning to be able to occur, and even then, not for everyone—you know that slaves made up between 70 and 80% of society at the time, I'm talking about Athens, I'm not even talking about the appalling slavery there was in Sparta, have you heard of the helots—to keep in practice on Saturdays they'd go slaughter a few slaves in the fields to stay warriors—there are those who want to go back to that, who find that we've gone soft, that we're becoming feminized, you hear that—but they're the same ones who want to sell us Jesus Christ, as Hegel said, go put those two thoughts together, there isn't even one there, that's a good one—you know he knew his Latin, because in Latin unus una unum means one and only one—you understand, when you have contradictory thoughts, it means you're not thinking, you're letting yourself be thought by others; if you don't think, get yourself thought by others—I'm paraphrasing Godard a bit at the start of Breathless. There you go, so this mutual implication
1:07:21 of philosophy and freedom—you see that it's concrete, just as I can allow myself to call words back into question because there's a certain degree of freedom—you wouldn't ask what good and evil are deep in an African tribe—I've lived there enough, I respect a cultural way of thinking, but there are things that just don't get asked—there are peoples where a woman doesn't even have the right to think her husband's name when she has her period—how do you want—the fear—well, they tell me that, they forbid me to think, and automatically I think about it, you see—you remember Captain Haddock, I don't know which one it's in, it's Red Sea Sharks, yes it's Red Sea Sharks, where there's Allan, the bastard, you see, who traps the captain, his former boss there, and who locks him in the cabin and tells him as he's leaving—sorry, I'm being a kid, talking about Tintin, it's such a guy thing, not very—not very—girls, Tintin, I know, well, think about it a bit—do you sleep with your beard over the sheet or under the sheet? Result: he doesn't sleep all night over it—so that doesn't work either, etc.—and yes, we talked about this regarding Kleist, the puppet theater, remember, that thought comes to disturb grace, etc., interesting.
1:08:31 So once again, there are—yes, there are peoples where a woman can't even think her husband's name, can you imagine—there's no more totalitarian society than one that will actually go check whether the woman is thinking—she's being checked on, it's terrible. So once again, philosophical questioning comes in its own time, historically—there aren't just parts within humanity, I'm fed up with post-Lévi-Straussian culturalism—I have great respect for Lévi-Strauss, especially for his musical culture, by the way—but still, well, there are some contributions all the same, I mean, kinship studies, that's a real discipline in anthropology now, and the combinatorial analysis that it allows—but still, his aggressive anti-progressivism, and especially the late Lévi-Strauss who's gone senile, who says we're all too numerous, that there are too many of us on the planet now, you know, it's the kind of thing said by those who always think there are too many of us, but when it comes to liquidating the surplus, they're never among them, you'll notice, every time. There, no, no, he's a great man, but, I mean, there are those who don't have his culture and don't have his nuances and who've felt authorized by him for years
1:09:41 to do what's called culturalism—that everything is relative, that there are parts of humanity scattered like that in space, and cultures in everything, and cultures this, and cultures that, well that's in that culture, it's not in mine—I was exasperated when I was in Africa to see white people arriving, businessmen often, newcomers—I'm not criticizing them as businessmen, though there'd be plenty to say, but that's not why—it's when they'd come say, tell me, Pagani, you who are an old Africa hand—right away, well, I'm an expert, there are people who've spent 40 years in Africa who still haven't understood anything, doesn't matter, since I've lasted long enough to talk like Africans, I'm an expert—so, and they'd ask me what do they think, what should we tell them, should we leave a tip, well, they were asking me questions as if we were talking about Martians, and I would have answered, I'll tell you a thing, a scoop, but don't repeat it: they want their children to go to school, to be well educated, to be in good health—ah, they were disappointed, well, they were disappointed, what the hell, they're guys, well yes, Africans are men, yes, that fits with what I'm saying, the universal is under attack, that's why I linger a bit against culturalism—so instead of parts
1:10:52 of humanity scattered in space—because there are enormous differences within humanity, and thankfully this diversity, which is marvelous, will be the charm of the journey—this diversity isn't only found among the branches—let's replace this diversity of parts in space with that of moments in time, that changes everything. When someone tells me you won't deny that in African culture there's a sense of solidarity, yes, I say yes, like my grandmother in Corsica—already a bit less my uncle, but I'm speaking at random, it's an impersonal example, Corsicans are touchy—so there you go, it's traditional rural culture that's more solidarity-based than urban culture where everyone's on their own with their two-bedroom flat—in Africa you start by greeting before speaking, that's magnificent to learn, greeting, you say hello first, and it takes time, it's not "it's fine"—no, no, today's work, today's family, it's long, the greeting is long—at 6pm on Boulevard Saint-Germain you're not going to, you see, greet everyone, it's not possible—well there you go, I'm not making a value judgment here, but there are parts
1:12:03 in space, and there are moments in time, and yes to diversity, but diversity unfolded through time—I'm not saying, but wait, aren't you being a bit evolutionist there, what does that mean—because I was born after Beethoven, so I'm automatically modern in my musical tastes—no, no, you have to relearn everything from zero each time, watch out, the baby born today, there, there are a few million born during the hour I've been speaking—there should be a little light bulb in China that lights up every time a baby is born, can you imagine, it would never stop blinking—so every baby that's born becomes Mowgli again, becomes the wild child again, has to relearn everything, there you go, so it's a democratic notion, but there are differences over time, things have to be reappropriated, there are some very fine texts by Hegel on this, he says at the same time it's easier because there are things that took millennia of effort which are now reduced to the level of children's games, of training exercises. There you go, so we've finished the introduction, from the moment
Crisis, trigger of philosophy 1:13:15 we know what to look for, we have a heading—that has quite a few advantages compared to getting lost on the open sea as soon as you've left port—right away knowing what—you remember I criticized Aristotle, for whom I have immense respect, there was a weak point, it's the very first words of his magnificent Metaphysics, which is a monument, moreover, and for its historical part, the first three books, where, thanks to him, we fortunately know a great many things about authors of whom nothing else remains, whose manuscript works haven't survived—that's the first three volumes, the ideas of our predecessors on the question, first historian of philosophy, and starting from the fourth we get into the heart of the matter with the principle of identity and non-contradiction, that's the immense history—but there are those very first words of the Metaphysics: all men by nature desire to know—you see, as if there were a spontaneity—no, you spoke of our friends the sharks, showing that sharks don't ask themselves too many questions, they haven't evolved much since the end of the primary era, precisely because they are masters of the game wherever they are and have no reason to ask themselves questions, because they don't know crisis—a bit toward Australia, because the Chinese quite like them, in soup, it would need to be that cold-blooded thing—there you go, but still, they're on their way to extinction, don't worry about that.
1:14:25 You just need to eat to know it. Moral of the story, I mean: if we ask ourselves questions, it's because we've taken a hit, it's not spontaneous, it's because we have a problem to solve, a difficulty—and so I'll finish there, coming back once more to the introduction: philosophy implies freedom, and it is triggered by a situation of crisis—there's an old complicity between philosophy and crisis; historically, it's crisis that calls man back to his freedom, that shakes him a bit out of his habits, in which freedom often gets lost—habit, I'm not criticizing habit in general, one can do a dialectic of habit, it's useful for this and harmful for that. Péguy—I don't often quote Péguy, who's a great Catholic—has a magnificent poem whose refrain is: dead wood is habituated wood, as he puts it, it's magnificent, everything that's too habituated—or Nietzsche at the start of Zarathustra, who says: it's not your sin that scandalizes heaven, it's your satisfaction—you're so used to saying, me, I'm a good guy, I'm one of the good ones, moreover I'm the empire of good and the Russians are evil, or the Chinese, the other one.
Empiricism and episteme: reality and truth 1:15:35 The other is evil, well yes, if the other is evil, then I am good — that's convenient, this kind of thing, when you think about it. That idiot, you know, who — I just documented this — had his jeans on, he couldn't get over having Texas on his jeans belt, he showed it to journalists — he was a poor guy, poor Bush really, a poor fellow. His father was clever, watch out for father Bush, it's him who started the friendship with the Bin Laden family, father Bush. The son, poor guy, that fellow inherits absolute power, it's terrible. Right, first part: what can I know? So, what can I know — I won't redo the diagram, but you see, we are seeking freedom, I can tell you now why I followed that order — the empirical answer first: what I can know is everything that experience teaches me, and in particular sense experience. We saw very quickly that that doesn't go far — again, if I look at the ground, I see it move, that's not what teaches me that we are in motion. And then scientific experimentation goes well beyond immediate, everyday observation — all the same, let's be fair, there is an empiricism that must be respected.
1:16:45 So, in short, empiricism had the immense merit — remember, we must be fair to every philosophical moment — of putting us in contact with the real, with reality, but by making us despair of ever being able to state the slightest truth about that reality, precisely because it is in contact with a world where, to speak like Heraclitus, panta rhei, everything flows — that's why Plato called Heraclitus 'the snot-nosed one,' everything flows — it's a play on words between Greeks, don't worry about it, Heraclitus deserves better than that. But everything flows, there you go, you want — I can't say 'Socrates is young,' he's already grown old by the time I've said it. Time goes, time wearies — no, madam, but we go away. Do you know that one?
1:17:32 It's Ronsard, isn't it well put? Time goes, time wearies — no, madam, but we go away. So empiricism gives us reality but not truth. So we want to know — quickly, this is a summary — knowing is not believing, it's not the local pub talk, toward which I have no contempt, I love going to the pub and playing the wise guy, knowing whether it's Marseille or Bastia that's going to win — no, that's a different function than truth. Chasing after time, I don't know how to play it smart, the CAC — how do you say — Montpellier, there, that's pub talk, but it's not the place where truth is established. Truth, as the Greek notion of epistēmē teaches us, is not that kind of thing: if A equals B then B equals A — that's not relative, it's not doxa, it's not opinion, it's not subjective, and you can't say 'it's my opinion that I impose on you,' because you're obliged to impose it on yourself if you want to talk with me. So I come back
1:18:42 to my point about the complicity between the philosopher and the mathematician and the scientist, before coming back later to that of the poet, in the more recent sessions especially, in the workshops — but with the mathematician, well, I'll go quickly, I won't go back over the fact that they both have in common, the philosopher and the mathematician, that they want their questioning to be answered in an epistemic way, in the mode of knowledge and not in the mode of opinion — even if they don't bear on the same objects at all, we've understood that now, we understand the distinction, but the common point is in the form of the answer: the form must be that of knowledge, even if this knowledge has quite different aspects. But that's still not enough — we understand better now that there is also a content, I'd almost say ethical and political, in the complicity between the philosopher and the mathematician. I just said it for the first time: starting with Euclid, I don't impose my opinion on you, if you disagree you check for yourself. There is a democratism immanent to the emergence of rational thought — that's what I'm saying, it's very important.
1:19:53 Because that too is criticized — the fashionable thinkers of the 'forty shameful years,' to speak like Clouscard, who succeeded the thirty glorious years, the Foucaults, the Deleuzes, the Derridas — they were not apostles of reason, quite the opposite; for Foucault, it's the beginning of the gulag, reason — we often blame reason. So it's important here to see this original complicity: first, the implication of freedom in the possibility — rightly or wrongly, maybe philosophy isn't possible, I haven't settled that — but if freedom isn't given, philosophy is not possible, that's what must be retained to be honest and rigorous. Secondly, the implication between philosophy and freedom: if there is no freedom, there's no point asking the question 'what must I do.' So, good news: let's look at the side of the scientist and the mathematician — something appeared in humanity all of a sudden that means that, for the first time, there can be communication between us that is not that of Séguéla — ah, but this is important what I'm saying — it's not the con job, it's not 'yeah yeah, that's just your opinion.'
1:21:03 And there you go, everyone locked in their own free enterprise — you see where opinionism comes from, and not from just any economic-political regime, from capitalist relativism, I won't even say bourgeois, on purpose, that everyone is locked in their own bubble — which is also true in certain respects, everyone is alone in certain respects — but that doesn't mean all communication is condemned to communicate only chimeras or opinions. That's what the miracle of rationality shows: if A equals B then B equals A — that's not Pagani imposing it on you with a club, and it wasn't imposed on me either; when I contest it, I contest it, but I'm forced to come back to it and confirm and validate it. There you go — yes, be in agreement with yourself before wanting to agree with me, with you, with him. So this agreement with oneself is important, which is non-contradiction — we owe that to logic, to mathematics, to Euclid, to Parmenides too no doubt, since Parmenides was the first to say: what is, is, and what is not, is not — which I used to tell the students, and you get a burst of laughter — well sir, there's no need for philosophers, you have to know that, you haven't understood.
1:22:13 the dizzying depth of someone who had just invented the excluded middle — what is, is, and what is not, is not, there's nothing in between. Parmenides, not far from Euclid chronologically, understood non-contradiction. When you start saying, 'but what was there before the Big Bang' — you mustn't contradict yourself: either you're told it's the absolute beginning and therefore there's nothing before, don't ask the question, or you don't say that. It's Spinoza, who is also a great geometer of thought — when you say that God gets angry because of our sins, you, the same ones, tell us he is omnipotent — first, that's indeed what you say, absolutely, he is omnipotent, we share that with the Muslims, omnipotence; second, he is eternal, yes — so it's been an eternity that he could do whatever he wants, do you believe things can still happen to him, starting with the fact that I hit on Marinette upsetting him — nonsense, God is not in that business, he cannot be, he cannot — he is the blessed one, as religion rightly says, whether we sin or not, he is blessed — I'm speaking of God the Father, not the Son, he doesn't look happy on the cross, that's not exactly a good time, that's a different matter, a different moment
1:23:24 of God. So, to keep the essential: this first part, we have seen — I'll still do it here, though I could remove it in the Socratic turn — if I detail the first part again, let me recall it gives this: 1, empiricism, that is, empeiria, experience, quite simply — what can I know, everything that experience teaches me. 1B, the antithesis, rationalism — French is really a funny language, I've had lots of people learning French, especially from other cultures, with the spelling: 'rationnel' with two n's, 'rationalisme' with one n, that's just how it is, I'm not making the spelling rules, mustn't confuse them. And finally our last part, determinism. So, very quickly.
Rationalism and determinism: from Plato to Newton 1:24:36 Here, remember, we have reality but without being able to state a truth about it. Here we manage to make truth: if A equals B, B equals A, there you go — but does that apply to a reality? That's not the mathematicians' problem — well, not entirely, I'm not saying no mathematicians are interested in that problem, but I mean it remains valid whether or not it's applied to a reality. That's non-contradiction — it doesn't mean it exists, but nothing will be possible that doesn't pass through this form. That's what possibility means in logic: what contains no contradiction. A castle of 34 million rooms, you say that's impossible — listen, it's not impossible, it's not contradictory, there were technicities in other periods of history. So here we have reality but we can't state truths; here we have truth but reality might well fly away; here we have existence; here we have essence. It's interesting — now I understand why Plato put at the entrance of his school: let no one enter here who is not a geometer. And yes, because he
1:25:46 is for the world of essences, the cosmos noetos, not the cosmos aisthetos, not the sensible world, the intelligible world. Whereas his pupil Aristotle — thirty years at Plato's school, mind you — Aristotle was rather drawn to biology, to empirical, observational things. The opposition begins with Aristotle and Plato — so it's not quite a chronological order, this is a logical order; if it were chronological, I would have put Plato before Aristotle. Here, we start from things — sit down, there's plenty of room — here we start from things, here we start from words, here we need statements, first definition, axiom, postulate, then we move on to theorems, that's the order of reasons. And there is a word running through this — well, it's not a French word, but you can guess it — here it's logos that reigns. But careful, it has many, many meanings: first, language, soliloquy, monologue, you see, all of that is logos, dialogue, etc.
1:26:56 Language first — language, discourse, speech, definition, all of that is logos, but also proportion, ratio, fraction in mathematics — all of that is logoi, plural, fractions indeed, because they are ratios, ratios of 3 to 2, of 4 — the same as that of 5 to 10, that's how it is, they're logoi. Little thumb — those are words; here it's logos; the white pebbles are indeed words — even though we've seen recently that the mathematician tries to eliminate words in order to reach these fundamental notions, and that mathemes, or if you prefer algorithms, are not quite words of natural language — there's no 'saucepan,' 'hair,' 'bananas,' or other raccoons. So, to link the two, to talk about reality while stating truths, I finally arrive at determinism — indeed.
1:28:06 With Spinoza: the order and connection of ideas is the same as that of things. That's the greatest triumph of scientific thought, when Newton, with a sentence a line and a half long, accounts for all the motion in the universe — it's extraordinary, the law of universal attraction, do you realize the power — the greatest mathematician of his time, along with Leibniz, both inventing infinitesimal calculus at almost the same time, which opens the way — not to modern maths, let's not confuse it with set-theoretic language, but let's say to the whole scientific universe from — well, we started with the calculation of areas, at the time, surfaces, and even surfaces bounded by curves, you couldn't do that before. Well, this Newton has one sentence: all bodies attract each other in direct proportion — yes, in direct proportion — to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance, period. And there you go — starting with Einstein, exceptions are shown when approaching the speed of light, but still, in the universe, most bodies are nowhere near the speed of light, and physicists use Newtonian physics every day for all sorts
1:29:16 of moving bodies in the universe. And even before all of them, Thales — is it a legend? The blossoming of rationality in Greece struck people's minds, but the story goes that Thales was once in Egypt — a source of Greece-Orient rivalry, as we saw earlier with Crete, isn't it — and I'm one of those who say there's no miracle in the sense that it just springs up like Minerva from the head of Jupiter — the head, not the thigh, the thigh is Dionysus — knowing that there's a lot of the Orient in Greek culture, Astarte, one of the names of Venus, is the same as Ishtar, the great Babylonian goddess, it's not — what is it — well, before that, I've seen it mentioned that people spoke about it many years before speaking with 'ennistres,' so we agree there, but there's always this muffled rivalry, and the story goes that Thales was at the foot of the pyramids and that the Egyptian sages said, why is the Greek so strong, go on then, measure the height of the pyramid. You heard the challenge — 50 degrees, the height
1:30:28 tiring, maybe even a sunstroke, get rid of the Greek — and in fact Thales had figured it out — Thales's shadow measures the pyramid, no need to climb it, he had found similarities, as they say, similar triangles, whatever you want to call it, proportions basically. Which meant he didn't measure — my shadow, the shadow of the pyramid on the ground, and you don't have to climb up, and that way there's only one unknown left, you see — knowing before going to see, determining in advance, that's extraordinary — to think that we can predict the eclipses that will occur in the next 50,000 years, and I'm being modest when I say 50,000, I won't give an exact figure to limit it a bit, but we also know all those that have occurred over the past 2 million years, that's quite extraordinary too — yes, predictability, I'll come back to it, I should have put freedom here too along with words, but it's linked, you can guess it a bit — the form of philosophical specificity is to question words, you saw that, we understood each other, its content is the stake of freedom.
1:31:38 So there must be a link somewhere between logos and freedom, even if they're opposed, there's a link anyway — we find it here, because I can only be determined, or determining, in a world that I can foresee, you see the connection with eclipses — it's not just that man became rational for the sake of knowledge, it's that he needed it. How could farmers not be able to predict something about the harvests of this and that, if it's chaos, if it's like a rhapsody with no continuity in nature — because that would be a failure of all action, not just of knowledge, of all human action, if everything were unpredictable, if we had gone back to the chaos of origins. So there we are, we've arrived at determinism, and then, crash, everything collapses — we had to change course, total crisis. That was a trauma — what was it — it's the end — last year, people kindly came to my workshop and everything, and I talk to them about it, it's a catastrophe, the crisis, what — determinism, that's opposed to freedom, well yes, I did nothing, we were in search
The crisis of determinism; sciences of matter and form 1:32:48 of freedom, and here we end up — our answer to the question 'what can I know' culminates in a moment of thought that is the negation of freedom. And even then, I'm giving a poor sign because I'm borrowing it from mathematics, and in mathematics there's no contradiction, no opposition, I simply said 'different from' — you see, that's weak compared to reality: it's either-or, either-or, either one is determined or one is free, not normally. So, if we continue like this, if we continue to adopt as our model of knowledge, of knowing, of answering the question 'what can I know,' the model of the so-called hard sciences or natural sciences etc. — I like to call them sciences of matter — you're going to find yourselves on my anti-eco side, I don't know, it must be my compulsion — but no, I take into account the historical moment we're living through, because in fact, as soon as I go for a walk in the forest, I'm more of an ecologist than the person who comes out — I notice, I can never walk with an ecologist in a forest, they're miserable there, they think it's an illusion, these forests, there's acid rain, they're doomed — it's a splendor
1:34:00 it's autumn, there are mushrooms, and you're miserable — so yes, my anti-eco side, yes, it's there, the more I develop empiricism, the more I dwell on this mode of knowledge of the hard sciences — that's why I speak of sciences of matter, why don't I call them sciences of nature — because there could be an ambiguity, listen carefully, because what I'm about to say has important moral and political consequences. Those who know me may be annoyed for the umpteenth time, but it's the example of the flowerpots — you know, you throw them off a balcony, I go up to a floor, high enough — Cyrano de Bergerac, he died from a flowerpot falling from a floor, you see, so you have to go up high enough — and there I drop two flowerpots, a natural flowerpot and a plastic flowerpot, natural, artificial, cultural, human, whatever you want — there's nothing less natural than plastic flowers, but both fall according to the same Newtonian law.
1:35:11 You see what I mean — Newton, GT2 half-pint, but yes — so it's not a law of nature, it applies just as well to plastic flowers, or to me, I don't know if I want to throw myself out the window, or to the feather that spirals down because of air resistance, otherwise it would fall in a straight line like a lead ball, at the same speed as a boule, if it were in a vacuum — that's what pure empiricism doesn't teach you, I really want — well, this is an important parenthesis — these are laws of matter, if we speak a bit rigorously, we are in philosophy after all, and matter is a huge set in which I make a big division: there is natural matter, and there is matter in which man has intervened, to which man has given a form, matter that man has informed, transformed — transcendence begins with chipped pebbles. Well yes, that's supernatural in the strict sense — I'm not launching into mystical delirium, but the religious dates from there, it's supernatural
1:36:22 it's not natural, an axe. Aristotle in De Anima, where he tries to define the soul, that is, for the Greeks, the living being — so you understand what follows, because for the Greeks psychology and biology are somewhat conflated, it's not Christian, there's no duality between body and soul, it's a world of immanence, not transcendence, etc. In short, to define why there are animated bodies, the hen, the earthworm — that's where we see it's not the soul in the Christian sense — as opposed to inert bodies, and to define this specific body, the living being, he said: if axes hanging on trees — you'd say their cutting edge is their soul. It's a beautiful image — it's the sharp, tapered shape of the axe that indicates — we said it earlier when we were looking for freedom — the end, the finality, the function of the axe is what the shape indicates the end; the flared shape of a glass is to hold a liquid; the pointed shape of the sword is to pierce my rival's chest, and so on. There's a link between form — it's the end made legible, the end that's no longer in my head as a project, the end that is what in Greek is called a telos
1:37:32 hence teleology — there's something beyond — 'television,' 'telemeter,' no — but the end that's there and that is legible to us, that's what form is, that's why form is so mysterious, and why Plato made a world of Forms beyond and transcendent to the world, that of the Ideas, because 'form' is said in Greek eidos — I had mentioned it briefly, I didn't want to dwell on it — that the same Greek word eidos was translated over the centuries, under Plato's pen, as 'idea,' and under Aristotle's pen, as 'form' — and afterward they get opposed to each other, they are opposed in certain respects, but still it's the same word, I mention it in passing — and that's where we see that it's what is discursive, what we can talk about, what makes this a glass and that I-don't-know-what, and this a microphone, and here's a box that must have served some purpose, and this a table, and this a pencil. That's the quiddity, as Aristotle said — each time it's the forms that indicate the functions to us — and by the way, there can be wine on the table, that's fine, because you see there's something circulating between a pencil, paper — there's a link, you know it, because we're in a world of writing
Toward the philosophy of action and flagrant instances 1:38:42 in our cultural unconscious, all that goes together, doesn't it — but if there were a raccoon in the middle there, that would seem odd, that would be a different classification, quite simply. I ask you to tidy your room or your apartment — you can arrange everything by size, by price, that doesn't give the same arrangement, you see, it's interesting, there's no single order among things — Spinoza thought about that very well. I think we've gone around the whole thing because we're arriving at the crisis, aren't we — well, I'll say it anyway, I have five minutes for this — it's from there, from this crisis, that we set aside the philosophy of knowledge, especially since it's successful — if you really want to know the world around us, that's fine, we've understood the recipe, it's the hard sciences side, and it keeps developing, that's very good, I'm speaking of the sciences, not of their applications, whatever they may be — and everything that belongs to ethos and to politics is something else. So, on the other hand, there's a whole royal road open to knowing oneself, and that's the philosophy of action — there's a link, isn't there, between the self and — we saw it earlier, all the words you gave me when we were looking for 'freedom,' 'will,' 'end' — what else was there?
1:39:52 Sorry? Action, etc. — that presupposes we're no longer in the universe of something, but that a someone has arisen, presupposes a subject, that we've left the world of objects, presupposes a self, you see? 'Know thyself,' as we now get there — you say that because there are those who say, wait, we're moving to the philosophy of action, 'what must I do,' and then you continue on knowledge — except it's no longer knowledge of the external world, it's knowledge of the self. Yes, but precisely, knowing oneself isn't holding your head in your hands like Rodin's Thinker — no, no, magnificent as it is, it's not 'getting a headache' as they say nowadays, that's not it, it's catching oneself red-handed, it's doing — don't forget we're in philosophy, that we're seeking an answer that has the scientific form, the form of epistēmē, and that was our great discovery in our turn, which almost drove us to despair, thank goodness we got out of the crisis, isn't it — it's when — look carefully in the workshops — it's when I come back to the myth of the cave, which sums up all this, sums up the whole itinerary of knowledge and prepares the turnaround, especially when the sun turns out to be a black sun, isn't it, when the sun — the cave goes dark
1:41:02 Plato's sun, which is the good one, the Greek world, the world of Apollo, going dark — ah well yes, that gives the Christian world, it moves from the outside to the inside, the cathedral taking over from the temple and the Parthenon — that's interesting too. There's a magnificent poem by Hölderlin which I recommend to you, called Bread and Wine — it's before he becomes completely incomprehensible, and it's after he becomes totally comprehensible, roughly speaking. So if you don't understand everything, that's not a problem — do I understand everything myself? Far from it, but first of all it's a splendor from start to finish — so when you listen to music, don't ask yourself whether you understood that it's rabbits running after cowboys, who cares, you like it or you don't, and on top of that, it's a splendor, you gain from it. It's a few pages, an immense hymn called Bread and Wine — he was saying, first of all, it's one of the very rare poems of Hölderlin where night is spoken of, because this is a fellow who admitted himself that his poetry was too crowded with light, that it lacked a bit of shadow — and well, this one begins with one of the most beautiful nocturnes in the history of poetry, but above all there's this opposition I've just made between ancient Greek Apollonian culture, irradiated by outer light
1:42:12 I'm not talking about the light of the soul — and the world of night brought by the torch-bearer, the Syrian as he calls him, Christ of course — a young theology student, all that, Hölderlin and Hegel, just to tell you how they started — and the world of night in which we've been living since the Middle Ages, but the world of night, lit, of the night which becomes the backdrop against which there's the world of dreams — the dream is the night, night as a screen, not the night of nothingness, no — and maybe that's where I'll conclude: he proposes to us moderns to define ourselves as living in the mode of 'waiting' — waiting for what?
1:42:52 the return — waiting — night is consoling and gives counsel, there you go. And I wouldn't want to conclude on something very rigorous — it's that man's action, our action, what end must we pursue, what must we do, that's not for us to decide in philosophy — there's been enough totalitarianism, in the most indefensible sense, for those who wanted to impose an answer to that kind of question. Humanity didn't wait for us to ask itself the question — it did better than ask it, humanity began to exist when man acted — I spoke of the chipped flint earlier, yes or no. So, to know what we must do, let's start by looking at what man has been doing for thousands of years, and that's since we've committed ourselves to analyzing, and no longer interpreting, these red-handed catches of action crystallized in achievements — so it's no longer empiricism, no longer the world around us in which man plays no part, but on the contrary, in what surrounds us, so, with experimental rigor, we have texts at our disposal, temples, the cathedral, the Greek temple, to compare — that's experimental, but to track down what in it?
1:43:59 precisely the traces of this vast movement of liberation which human action consists of. I mentioned a bit earlier Oedipus's answer to the Sphinx, which is one of the elements of this liberation, because if I don't answer — man, if it's not man that's the solution, it's the Sphinx that devours you, whereas to answer 'man' is Oedipus killing the Sphinx. So it's from that moment that we stopped giving lectures and moved on to text commentary — do those who have kindly been with us from the start find their bearings a bit better, because I seem to jump from topic to topic, but I'm a bit sly, seemingly for no reason, I try to leave matrices for a certain continuity all the same — so that's why I moved on to text commentary, because I needed red-handed catches there — we just came out of Racine, didn't we, I'll pick up a bit next time with a little commentary on Homer too, since all those myths go back to Homer, and in Racine you'll see why — and this turnaround began with our first text, which was Baudelaire's 'The Cracked Bell,' if you remember well, that's the text that completely reoriented us toward red-handed catches
1:45:09 I believe that without 'The Cracked Bell' we wouldn't have distinguished society from community, the abstract individual from the concrete self, etc. So we'll try to continue along these two paths. Thank you for coming, thank you.
