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Last session: to deduce, and Hegel's lessons 0:00 Well, as you no doubt know, and as has just been confirmed to you, this is the last time we'll meet in this setting, at least until next season - that's how they say it in TV series - until the new school year, anyway. And I'm all the more inclined to thank you for your constancy, your faithfulness.
0:31 And especially since this is the season when things get a bit livelier. There's the call of good weather starting to make itself felt, the call of far-off places, the beaches - you'll be treated to Michel Onfray on France Culture every July, that's why I call him the seaside philosopher. There's no reason to pick on him in particular. And then there are exam supervisors, there are the exams themselves - that's a lot of centrifugal forces in this lovely season.
1:07 Whereas last time we were a bit - not arid, but I mean, I used the myth of the cave a bit to gather our ideas together, if I may say so, mine included, and try to synthesize a bit what we'd seen this year. For the others, what we've been seeing for 4 years - I've reached an age where I can go over things again, what do you want me to say. I can repeat myself, and after all, since repetition is somewhat the theme of our discussions this year, it was quite fitting. I already told you, and I repeat it, that I try each time to give a talk that's more or less complete - I mean complete, we're never exhaustive at that level, but I mean there's no need for a necessary continuation.
2:06 And besides, I told you last time that there's a little chair left here, if anyone's looking for a seat. I told you that by reflecting on what I might have said 3 years ago, 2 years ago, 6 months ago, you can deduce - without my intervention, it's not obvious right away, you need a bit of practice - but you can deduce, not induce, deduce, that is, by reflecting, see the necessary consequences, as from a second-degree trinomial.
2:51 Thomas is here, I'm looking at him, I'm afraid of saying something stupid. You can, just with the canonical form of the trinomial, without any numerical parameter, deduce the discriminant. I did this once with a terminale S class, so that he'd be at ease all year - it worked without fail. So what am I getting at? I mean that if you can't do it, it's not just for lack of practice, and I told you this rather evasively and allusively last time, I'm driving the point home: it's because you don't trust yourselves enough.
3:32 I could have brought - but I don't want to turn this into a reading session either, there are so many things to read - a magnificent text that Hegel puts as a preface to his lectures on the history of philosophy, which must be clearly distinguished from his lectures on the philosophy of history. There are the works of Hegel that he takes responsibility for, and then there are his lectures. The lectures aren't written in his hand, they're the courses, notes taken by his students - his studious students, they were Germans, conscientious. And so what's called Hegel's aesthetics, he didn't write a single line of it, he gave a course for a whole year, and besides, he was wary of censorship.
4:08 Words fly away, writings remain. Since he was employed by the ministry of religious affairs, that's what it was called, and not of national education, you understand, one had to be careful all the same. After all, this gentleman, our children are in his hands, so they saddled him with censors here and there. In short, the lectures are far more accessible as philosophical language than his actual works proper, than the Greater Logic, which demands a lot of work, a lot of effort, than the Phenomenology of Spirit, even more than the youthful works which bear the mark of that complex language of German idealism, as it's called, whereas in the lectures he's addressing students, sometimes first-year students, so it's much clearer, much more progressive, didactic.
4:58 That doesn't mean it's easier. This is a Hegel with hindsight, etc. It's the richest in content, but the form is more accessible. I won't dwell on it, that's not my subject today, but I simply want to say that he's writing at a moment, historically, when things are being put back in place in Europe - not in the way he, Hegel, would have wanted - it's the period historians call the Restoration. The last convulsions of the French Revolution had been curbed. The last convulsions being the Grande Armée, I mean, because Napoleon - who's a bit like De Gaulle later, that kind of right-wing guy who nonetheless knows very well that you can't go back indefinitely, who has a sense of the State.
5:40 He could have gone back to the fleur-de-lis flag, Napoleon, but he understood that the blue-white-red was here to stay. Still, that was too much for Metternich, for the Holy Alliance - that's what NATO was called back then. Today's NATO is the Holy Alliance, call it what you like. Well, listen, it's the same people, it's always Anglo-Saxon money, the IMF - sorry, back then it was England, the Bank of England. And the cannon fodder was the Prussians, the Russians, the Germans - in fact, in the Grande Armée, by the end, there were more German-speakers than French fighting under the French flag.
6:15 Well, let's not dwell on it - so, it's peace, there you go, and Hegel opens his course around the year 1820, with a magnificent text, I recommend it to you, the preface - there are several, there are others, three - he tries again, to his taste, in the lectures on the history of philosophy, saying: look, events have receded, we can return to pure thought. All right? So he sublimates a bit the bitterness he felt, and he sees the advantage in the drawback, he says, well, now we no longer have the excuse of urgency, of militating, of taking sides, of deciding - we're no longer in, because Kant recalled practical philosophy to action, we're returning to purely theoretical interests, we need that a bit.
7:03 It's been a while now since we were pushed around by urgent situations - imagine Europe, the quagmire of Spain, the terrible war in Spain, Napoleon's greatest blunder, and all the way to Russia, right? Good. And so, why am I talking about this? Because at one point he says: man must never underestimate the strength of his mind, nothing can resist it. And so that echoes the sentence I quoted to you last time, on which I dwelt, which is rather solemn, in the preface - another preface, much more famous - to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he says - when I spoke, you remember, of the principles of Descartes's method last time, I spoke of the second principle called the principle of analysis, where Descartes says - there are four of them, you see, it comes back to me by heart, four, that's not many, not like Aristotle's logic which fills four volumes.
Dividing, the "absolute power" of understanding 7:59 The second was to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as might be required to solve them better - that's what's called analysis, reducing the complex to the simple. Geometers have known this since antiquity - to calculate the area, the surface of a regular polygon, you divide it into surfaces of figures whose area formula was already known, into triangles for example, right, so by successive reduction, the complex is reduced to the simple, the new to the old, the compound to the elementary, etc.
8:43 And that's how even the curved can be reduced to the straight, right - well that's what's called analysis, whether it's analysis in chemistry, the analysis of water, right, where you break down what presents itself, what is first given as a totality - water - into its constituent elements, the water molecule; you can go further, there are atoms, no, that's no longer water, a hydrogen atom is not water, that's interesting too, don't say it - are there even smaller parts of water still, they'd need to be parts of the same word - that's not a physical problem, the word, watch out, it needs to still be water, for us to call it water - if we go beyond H2O, if we go into H or O taken separately, we do indeed have gases, but it's no longer water, even though for water to appear as a gas, all you need is to put the pot on the fire, past 100 degrees, we agree entirely - analysis, in chemistry, in mathematics of course, that's how it started, breaking down a whole into its constituent elements,
9:53 but the strange sentence, here it is, because Hegel knows very well that analysis is what's most opposed to the dominant ideology of his time - I say ideology, excuse me, that's an anachronism, it's a term that will come later with Marx, but I mean the current, philosophical, literary, pictorial, musical, legal, historical of course - I'm talking about Romanticism, the fabulous verbal ocean of German Romanticism, as one of its best translators, Armel Guerne, calls it, right, and he knows very well that analysis is not exactly to the Romantics' taste, and so he brings in this passage which I quote to you again: the power of dividing is the strength and labor of the understanding - it's no longer sensibility, sensibility, understanding, reason - it's no longer the senses, on the contrary, the senses don't divide, the senses receive the whole as a whole, the senses don't say this is up, this is down, this is left, this is right - that's analysis - there's the tablet, there, I see a tablet, ah no, it's not one, there are four bits, and then when I see the top,
11:03 there's a top of the top, a left of the top, and so on to infinity - yes, the activity of dividing is the strength and labor of the understanding, comma, of the most prodigious power there is, or rather of absolute power - it's a strange passage - death, if we want to call this fearsome activity that, and what is most terrible, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength - it's not this life, that's not what he says next, it's not this life, here he's un-romantic, it's not this life that shrinks from death and preserves itself pure of destruction - modern narcissism - but the life that endures death and maintains itself in it that is the true life of the spirit: colon - a formula that has become famous - the spirit only wins its truth by finding itself in absolute dismemberment, by not fearing analysis, by not fearing being rid of counterfeit money, if there is counterfeit - you're not impoverished when you're rid of counterfeit money, if you believe it's solid
12:13 and the chemist tells you but there's more empty space than solid matter in there, as in practically all the bodies around us, right? That'll remind us of what we've known in philosophy since Socrates and since Plato, that the most immediate grasp - what's called the bottom of the cave, that was well forbidden here - and that we believe is the most concrete because we haven't yet begun to think, to articulate, we haven't even begun to speak, we've only had being, being, as they say with a capital B in Heidegger's manner.
12:44 We believe that our most concrete thought is the most abstract and the poorest. That's what makes me say: solid ground, it doesn't move, whereas we're moving at 30 km a second around the sun, as you well know. There you go. Good. The activity of dividing is the strength and labor of the understanding, of the most prodigious power there is, or rather of absolute power. There you go. I repeat it all the more willingly since Hegel was one of the greatest critics of the abusive use of understanding.
13:16 Understanding is what's called intelligence in the most abstract sense - I was about to say in the most reductive sense, but I deliberately quoted this passage from Hegel to show that it need not be reductive at all, it's a power. I come back to it a bit when I said here there's the top, there's the bottom, but within the top there's this line, but I can take the middle, I can take the middle of the middle - and he has this striking formula, the 'here' being pointed at, what does 'here' mean? Is it here or is it there? There are many heres within this here. That's him, I'm quoting him: there are many heres within the here. And in fact he ends up with this striking formula: the here that is meant is the point, but it is not.
13:51 And it's because it is not that we keep searching for it endlessly. The point is a non-being. And that's for space, we can do the same thing for time - when we say 'now,' there's no time to say 'now,' the now is already past. French engineers make the finest clocks in the world, which they sell to the United States, to NASA, etc. They understand very well what I mean, because there we measure a billionth of a second for certain technologies where these differences can be decisive - these seemingly infinitesimal differences.
The myth of the cave: the ascent and the descent 14:25 Where am I going with this? I come back to the myth of the cave. I dwelt on it at length last time, I used it to review a bit. We'd talked a lot about practical philosophy in the Kantian sense, about self-knowledge, and for those who weren't there at the beginning, we'd somewhat left aside the theoretical effort, that great part of philosophy which it shares with the sciences, which tries to answer the question: what can I know. Not what must I do, that's not the order of values, it's not the order of what ought to be, but the order of what is.
14:57 There you go. Today I'll do the reverse, by symmetry, right? Plato served us well, remember he had inscribed at the entrance to his school that none may enter who is not a geometer. So, to recap, theoretical philosophy - it's an excellent reference. Plato, let me say in passing about Plato, I remember, someone told me, but what's he telling us? I mean, science has evolved in 2000 years, he says Plato is a scientific reference. I knew a physicist who worked at CERN, in Geneva, in the very first years CERN was operating, you know, it's the largest particle accelerator in the world, and he told me there's a genuine resurrection of Platonism in quantum theory.
15:43 I won't decide the matter, it's not my field. Still, this was a physicist who knew a bit about it, who told me: Plato, really, the non-natural numbers, well, you shouldn't take Plato lightly on that level. But, we've gone through practical philosophy all the way up to the sun. You remember, the whole circuit, I won't go back over it, otherwise - since this is our last discussion, I mustn't stretch out the digressions excessively.
16:16 From the bottom of the cave to the sun, we have the whole course of theoretical philosophy, of the answer to the question: what can I know. And then we saw that afterward, there's the return from the sun to the bottom of the cave, which is the great political Plato. Nothing to do with the former. It's no longer a matter of knowing what is. One must go back down into the cave to tell the others: but what you're seeing there, that's not it, that's not what is. That's appearance, it's nothing, it's fake. I'm simplifying, it's not nothing.
16:46 There are shadows of shadows at the bottom of the cave that remind me of something. Otherwise, if there were absolutely no relation between the sun and the bottom of the cave, there would be no path leading from the bottom of the cave to the sun. And Plato knew this well, he who said all knowledge is recollection. It happens that at the bottom of the cave, in the sensible world, in what we see, in what we touch, in what I was saying barely a quarter of an hour ago is the poorest, most immediate knowledge, which believes itself the most concrete, but is in fact the most abstract, in the proper sense - which abstracts most from reality in its complexity.
17:20 It remains that things happen at the bottom of the cave that recall, by analogy, by correspondence - I quoted you Baudelaire's Correspondances last time, deliberately, telling you that all so-called modern poetry - it's not me saying it, it's what literature, the university, teaches - that Baudelaire inaugurates the tradition of modern poetry by placing itself under the aegis of a kind of Platonism. Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let confused words escape - there's the bottom of the cave, it's not Greek geometry - confused words - man passes through forests of symbols which observe him - not 'which' as in things, 'who' - it is the symbols that observe man, that's more unsettling, it's not man looking at symbols as in a museum.
18:08 Man passes through forests of symbols which watch him with familiar glances. Man is familiar to the symbols. That's a bit unsettling - usually it's rather man who is a bit astonished before symbols. Imagine Oedipus before the Sphinx, before the riddle. And here, the symbols watch man, they know him. So there you have it, these two great arcs, you see - the philosophy of knowledge, from the bottom of the cave, from the world of copies toward the world of models, I won't go back over it - and then afterward, the descent back down.
Being modern: de-divinization and the idea of freedom 18:48 The descent back down - I was a bit brief about it, that's what I'm going to develop today, but not with Plato. I told you last time that to update the answer to the question 'what must I do,' one must leave antiquity and become modern again. One must, as it were, recall a phrase from the conclusion of A Season in Hell - go on, give me the quote, you know it. Thank you - one must be absolutely modern. That's Rimbaud telling you, no less.
19:18 Listen to this kid, who is the most mature among us. To hold the ground gained, as he says somewhere. That's right after. Absolutely modern. Absolutely doesn't mean going to see a Cubist painting exhibition. Let me tell you, this isn't bourgeois-bohemian talk. I love Cubism, don't put words in my mouth that I haven't said. But some people's enthusiasm for Cubism can have nothing to do with the genius of a Picasso or a Braque.
19:49 One must be absolutely modern by assuming the consequences. So, I told you why the myth of the cave is useful when you're lost trying to review the whole philosophy syllabus, but in an abstract way. We can't ask Plato either, right, coming as he does from a slave-owning world, etc., to update the questions the way they arise today, two centuries after the French Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, and 20 centuries after the appearance of Christianity, which says one must bow before nothing and that if there is a god, he is never here, he is beyond.
20:25 What is practical, we never see it. That's how we came out of antiquity. In antiquity, one trembled constantly before the divine. You couldn't take two steps without entering a sacred grove or being watched by hubris. You know, hubris is when there's a mixing of the human and the divine, the transgression of a boundary. The divine is omnipresent. Believe someone who's lived - and I'm not the only one in this room - many years in Africa, you rub shoulders with the divine all the time, with the sacred.
20:56 In those cultures - I'm not doing exoticism here - it was like that in our own countryside not so long ago. And it's still like that in the Berry region, apparently. I hope there are no Berrichons here - though it's not pejorative at all. Apparently in Berry there are still more witches per capita than elsewhere. They cast spells on the neighbor's cows. There you go. And where I'm from, in Corsica, there are still keening women who come afterward, when there's a death, tearing their hair out in front of the body, then afterward they yawn a bit, get given a coffee, then chat about the day's gossip.
21:26 After having been in a trance. Good. No, seriously. With Christianity, what's new, what's revolutionary - I didn't say with the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church, the institution does everything to reclaim things afterward, to prevent religion from going all the way with its message - but it is said in Matthew, in the Gospel of Matthew, that there can be no Christian priest nor Christian Church. Except in the sense of Church meaning the assembly of all those who believe in the word of the good news.
21:57 So, the fact of saying God is not in herbis et lapidibus, as they say in Latin - he is not in the grasses nor in the stones. It's no longer the divine, it's God. It's no longer divinized nature, there are no longer, sorry, nymphs behind the springs. So the springs are given back to their H2O. There's a de-divinization of the world that begins with Christianity. Precisely because the divine element withdrew from the here-below to go toward the beyond.
22:29 It's a dialectic that must be understood, it wasn't at all the intention. I'm not saying that the prophets who preached the first elements of the New Testament had this as their conscious mission, to de-divinize the world. On the contrary, they were convinced they were bearing the word of the true God. But objectively, in history, that created a civilization - you know it, it's yours, it's ours. A technological civilization, the one that would be sanctioned by a Descartes who says that man should become master and possessor of nature - you can't be master and possessor of a spring when you think there are naiads behind it who might avenge themselves for the little dam you're about to build.
23:12 Even though it comes back a bit - when there's a tsunami, people say nature has taken revenge. We start personifying it again. Well, we must be fair to it. So, I told you, in place of Plato's sun, to make it modern, to update the myth of the cave, and so that it's not merely formally true for the whole philosophy syllabus - knowledge as well as action - but so that the content itself is updated, we'd need to replace the sun which, according to Plato, represents the Good.
23:48 The sun is the equivalent, in the sensible world, in representation, of what, at the level of thought, conceptually, is the Idea in the Platonic sense, the eidos. You know, that strange word translated as 'form' in Aristotle and 'idea' in Plato. And well, to complicate matters further, to simplify nothing, this term that Plato opposes to the sensible world, the Idea, which is furthest from the sensible, comes from a word meaning visual outline. You see? You know, when we say anthropoid apes, what does that mean?
24:20 Which have the look of man. That's exactly what it means. When we talk about paranoid symptoms - now I'm moving into psychiatry, no, into anthropology - it means it's not really paranoia, but it's not far off. You see? It has the look of it. In 'look' there's 'spectacle.' You see? In English, 'spectacle' also means eyeglasses, in a way. The visual is present there. Well, even if for Plato it's the vision of the soul, let's not complicate things.
Rousseau, Newton of morality according to Kant 24:53 Be that as it may, the idea of the Good embodied by the sun in the sensible world must be replaced, to be modern, by the idea of freedom. There you go. I won't demonstrate it, otherwise we go in circles and don't move forward. This is our last session. My apologies to the newcomers. So, if I replace it with the idea of freedom, I set aside the Platonic reference and I make use of Rousseau. Arbitrarily, because I have a bit of a soft spot for Rousseau.
25:25 It happens to me - he has some annoying sides too. But I'm not here to tell you what I'm into, as you'd say these days, or what I'm not into. No, no. Why? Because when Kant said of Rousseau that he is the Newton of morality - one must never forget that formula. I'm going to bring Rousseau back in here. It's precise, these aren't grandiose phrases, it doesn't mean he's as strong as Newton. No, it's the Newton, but of morality. First, it's Newton.
25:55 Let's analyze it. Come on, analysis, we divide. Kant's sentence: it's Newton. For Kant, that's one of the greatest tributes one can pay. Newton, in his time, is the culmination of the theoretical outlook when it applies to what is external to us, to physis, to physics, to nature. There you go. It's the generation immediately after Newton, Kant. And Newtonian physics would remain the absolute reference until the first - I won't say crack, because it didn't crack - until the expansions imposed on it by the theory of relativity at the very start of the 20th century, and a bit later, quantum theory.
26:34 But, as I told you last time and I repeat it, it can never be repeated enough, we are not in philosophy. We are in physics. We are not here to throw arguments at each other's faces, we are here to exchange information. It's a phrase from Bachelard. At a physics conference, you throw arguments at each other's faces — no, at a philosophy conference, you throw arguments at each other's faces. At a physics conference, you exchange information. That's not always true. Between teams of Nobel-prize contenders, there can be dirty tricks. Isn't that right, Erwan?
27:05 No, but what is certain is that Newton remains valid. That's what I mean. You don't take the old physics and throw it in the trash. That's not how it works in physics. It remains valid, but it is no longer universal. It has a domain of definition that circumscribes its domain of application. Roughly, for objects that don't get too close to the speed of light, it applies very well. That's a lot of the universe. Starting with the heavenly bodies around us. You can apply Newtonian physics to them and it works very well.
27:36 So it's an enormous tribute. Rousseau is the Newton. But careful, not of knowledge, but of action. Because morality is the answer to the question: not what can I know, but what must I do? You see how everything hangs together. It's not a matter of observing things and analyzing them, even consulting them, to see what belongs to the order of being, but on the contrary, of transforming them.
28:07 This is Marx's famous phrase: until now philosophers could only interpret the world — that's the theoretical order — we want to transform it. That's the practical order. Well, Rousseau would be the Newton of this theoretical-practical passage. And that's why you don't find in Rousseau the abstract and complex developments that you find in the great metaphysicians of the previous century. You see?
The Letter on Virtue: morality is not a form of knowledge 28:37 I recommend an incredible text because it was only translated into French in 1972. You know, Rousseau is the kind of author where everything has been translated, written, published, in every possible edition. There was the tricentenary, not so long ago, in 2012. On that occasion, there were publications like never before. Yet we had to wait until 1972 for a publication — 3 euros, I have no shares in it — 3 euros, a small collection from Flammarion, very well done, the Mille et une nuits, foundational texts like that.
29:12 And for 3 euros you get two texts, independent of one another. One text on the relationship between society and the individual, and another, on roughly the same theme, called — and this is the one I recommend — the Letter on Virtue. A letter because it's a reply to someone who asked him a very simple question — the question that comes up in the 18th century, the century of libertinage, isn't it? The century of Fragonard in painting. Do you know Fragonard's Le Verrou? That's not virtue, that one. It's wonderful.
29:42 The century of the Marquis de Sade, the century of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and therefore a century obsessed with virtue — that goes together. Look at Diderot, who was a great libertine, how he gets misty-eyed over virtue as soon as he talks about painting. That's not when he talks about Greuze's paintings. In the Letter on Virtue, I am in the process of illustrating that we have left theoretical philosophy, and Rousseau insists that he is not going to produce abstract developments.
30:15 Don't expect, he tells his correspondent, to find here metaphysical dissertations. Nor all that apparatus of words that many readers will no doubt look for here, and which serves only to make man more vain without making him better or more enlightened. This affectation — this posture, as we would say today — of doctrine would suit neither the author nor the work, in a matter where it is no longer a question of perceiving virtue but of feeling it, and where the simplest people always understand it better than the most learned.
30:51 You see that our last session brings us back to the very first ones. What did we begin with? We keep in mind, since 2014, that philosophia, the search for sophia — I'm speaking Greek, not to Heideggerize, but to respect the ambivalence of the term, to recall that if you translate it into French you need at least two words: savoir and sagesse, knowledge and wisdom. I'm just reminding you. That is, the word itself says that you must concern yourself both with the theoretical — what can be known — and with the more practical wisdom.
31:22 Now, I had said from the start, pay attention, especially regarding knowledge. Careful, you need to hold on, we have to start. Since 2000 years ago, Euclid, since the discovery of infinitesimal calculus in the 17th century — I'll stick to mathematics — the prodigious development of mathematics in the 19th century, non-Euclidean geometries at the start of the 20th century. Whereas, you don't wait all that time to decide, in a village deep in Africa or in the Amazon, that no one in the village should be allowed to throw a dead cow into the village well.
32:00 Do you agree? That, you just don't do it, as a tough guy from the projects would say. You just don't do it. Well yes, there are urgencies. If all of a sudden we're driving and I see someone about to run a stop sign and I shout 'stop!' at you, you're not going to answer me 'what do you mean by stop?' No — that's where we see the gap between the theoretical and the practical. Earlier I told you, Hegel said, well, the war is over, urgency could excuse action, we must return to theoretical distance.
32:35 But no, with Rousseau, I tell you the opposite: since — let's take a very common issue nowadays — you know, euthanasia, what do you call it, end-of-life care, thank you, palliative care, etc. Should I finish off my grandmother? My poor grandmother, I'm talking about this a long time after she passed away. Grandmothers are perishable.
33:07 Should I finish her off? Or should I shorten her suffering? Or should I let her live? There are people who settle this on TV panel shows — I admire them. In my opinion, in 2000 years we'll still be discussing these things. Well, do you have the answer? Or, if you have one, I hope you'll change it tomorrow morning, like I do. Sometimes I don't know, sometimes I feel one way, sometimes I don't know. We're no longer in the theoretical. And above all, it's not the doctor with the medical degree who is the highest authority.
Freedom, gravitation in reverse 33:37 He will do what he's told. If you want, I'll finish her off, I know how to do it without making her suffer. That's not the question — it's you who decides. You see, it's no longer theoretical competence that counts. It's another kind of competence, moral competence. And that's why Kant calls Rousseau the Newton of morality. So let me continue the parallel. Let's go. Newton — what is he? Above all, in popular memory, and not only there, he's still the law of universal gravitation. A tiny little phrase, where bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and inverse proportion to the square of their distance. Full stop!
34:08 All the movements of the universe, practically of the era, right? Accounted for by a single formula, a single law. What power! The human mind was right, and it was there. The universe cannot resist human theoretical questioning, understanding. Not reason, not sensibility, in between the two, it's the understanding, the clever one. But I'm just going along with it. Gravitation. He's grave, the guy.
34:39 That means he's grave. It means he's annoying, he's heavy. But language doesn't get it wrong. Language knows things. It knows more than those who use it. Starting with me. It has the answers to the questions we ask it, language does. What speaking means. So there's the direction of gravitation. I'm in the realm of representation, I'm no longer in science — you know that in science there's no more up and down, thankfully.
35:12 I'm pointing to Australia, and down there, in Australia, there's a guy who says 'that's up' while pointing down. It points to the center of the Earth. There you go. What we've known since Newton, whether in Australia or here, is that density — the masses accumulated over the time things have been falling onto the Earth, coming from the far reaches of the universe — ends up creating great density. The center of the Earth is denser, you'd guess, than the sand of the Sahara at the surface. Rousseau is the Newton of morality.
35:46 Well, let's continue the parallel. That's the direction of gravitation. Freedom is the opposite direction. You see how profound Kant's phrase is. It's the same thing but reversed. It's Newton in reverse. It's as powerful in liberation as Newton is powerful in submission. Newton is not about insubordination. Newton expresses the submission of objects to the law of universal gravitation. But that belongs to the order of nature. The law of cause and effect, where what counts is force, not right.
36:19 Whereas here, we're going to talk about someone who wrote The Social Contract. We are no longer dealing with force. I'm dwelling on this difference because we too often skip over the first pages of The Social Contract. Because we're impatient to see what he says about the sovereign, parliament, etc. Yet in practically the first fifty pages of The Social Contract, Rousseau wrestles with the concept of force. And more precisely, he settles his accounts with the so-called law of the strongest.
36:50 It's no accident that he starts there. I want to show the philosophical stakes, not just the political ones. We've just seen that in the order of nature, force is the fundamental concept. It's with the concept of force that you begin a physics course, a beginner's course. You can call it forms of energy, whatever you like.
37:20 It's force. Afterward, you build all the other physical concepts from this primordial concept of force. The force needed to move the book on the table. I've just done what's called, in physics, work — that is, the displacement of a body in space, which requires a certain force. There. But I could have done it faster, because then it's not just about work. I would have increased the power.
37:50 You see, all the concepts — that is, the relation to time, because covering a kilometer in three seconds and covering it in three hours is not the same power. It's the same work. I've made the displacement over three kilometers, but it's not the same power. All the fundamental physical concepts are derived from the concept of force. To the point — I've often said this — in a conversation with Erwan, whom I thank for his insights, I had a physics colleague, back when Erwan wasn't yet born, an agrégé, who told me: give me the concept of energy, and I'll derive all of physics from it for you.
38:22 Granted, the concept of energy isn't obvious, but you have to start there. It's force. There's nothing pejorative about it in nature. That the sun is stronger than the Earth — a greater mass — means the Earth revolves around it and not the other way around. Then the Earth does the same with the Moon. The Moon doesn't have the option of saying, 'I'm getting tired of revolving around the Earth. For a change of scenery, I'll go revolve around Venus instead — it's nicer.' No, it can't. It's force.
Converting force into right: possession and property 38:54 And here's what Rousseau says in The Social Contract, in that passage on the first page: the strongest — watch out, the strongest isn't Caesar, isn't Napoleon, isn't just Caesar, isn't General de Gaulle, it's straight-up Macron. Well yes, we say Jupiter. Mustn't shy away from exaggeration. The strongest, says Rousseau — careful now, this is nuclear, but moral — is never strong enough to be always, always the master; he can be it for a moment, but to be always the master, he must convert his force into right, and obedience into duty.
39:41 Up until then, I wasn't obeying out of duty, I was obeying because I had no choice, because I didn't feel like tasting the whip. So the strongest is never strong enough to be always the master unless he converts — converts what? Force into right. Well now, the rule of law, that's still worth something, isn't it. There are cows on the beaches back home, right. In civilized countries, you're not allowed to let animals roam free.
40:13 Oh, I'm going to get scolded again by my compatriots. Is this being filmed? Yes. The passage from force to right is a conversion. There's no continuous passage. It's not slightly less force. No, right is not force. The great difference is that force concerns relations between things — a relation between the material parameters of beings.
40:45 Whereas right is a relation not between some-things, but between some-ones. There's a magnificent passage in The Social Contract, Book 1, but this time in chapter 8, well beyond the beginning, where Rousseau, having distinguished the state of nature from the civil state — I won't go back over that text, which I quote fairly often — draws a consequence in which he opposes, distinguishes, indeed opposes, possession and property.
41:17 The Social Contract is a work of rigor. It's not the Rousseau of the Reveries or of La Nouvelle Héloïse, it's not the novelistic Rousseau. It's an implacable demonstrative dryness. And he says possession is only the effect of force. Let's be clear: a lion possesses an antelope in its jaws. That's possession. Or rather, let's say a cheetah. Can you guess why? Because the cheetah isn't going to keep it for long. Because it's a cheetah. Ah yes, right, it's the speed champion, but really it only does 70 km/h for a few seconds, it doesn't last long.
41:50 It's not very well equipped. I say that because it's endangered, the cheetah. It only has one small litter. It doesn't have retractable claws — the only felid that doesn't — to the point that some hesitate to classify it among the felids. I sound like I'm pitying it, but I love cheetahs. But in terms of evolution, it's not the best-equipped of the felids. Whereas the panther is found almost everywhere, in forests, in deserts, etc., because it adapts much better to its biotope, as they say. So the cheetah makes 30 attempts before finally catching the little gazelle its starving cubs are waiting for in the den.
42:25 And when it finally has it, the lion, who's been dozing until then, opens one eye, sees that the cheetah has worked for him, and with one swipe of its paw takes it away. That's possession. It's not right. It's the strongest who wins. That's all. 'According to whether you are powerful or wretched,' as La Fontaine says, right? About the lion precisely, in The Animals Sick with the Plague. And what does he oppose this to?
42:56 Can you guess what he's going to oppose possession to? Well, to property, bravo. Property is a right. The difference is that to have the status of owner, you need me to recognize you as such. It happens between some-ones. You see what I meant earlier? What tells you that this belongs to me? Is it under the microscope that you'll see it?
43:28 Is it by scrutinizing its chemical, physical nature that you're going to deduce: this belongs to you? No. Because if it belonged to Hugo, I mean, the booklet wouldn't change its chemical composition. You have to step outside the book to see whether it was mine or not. I say that because I had students who'd shout out, 'no but sir, we know you, we know it's yours' — I could have stolen it! 'Oh no sir, you're not a thief.' What do you know about that? He's a thief.
44:00 So it's not something empirical, it's not sense experience. Property is not an empirical notion. Right, you see — I'm digging into the enormous differences here. You'd say force, right, well of course, they're not the same, force is nasty, right is better after all. No, but it's much more serious than that: there is, as an expression of Kant's puts it, an unbridgeable abyss between the two. There is no continuous passage from force to right. Nature cannot manufacture a right.
44:31 And conversely, right needs things that exist — which is the case in nature — in order to be exercised, in order to reign. I don't know. You see, we're in the middle of great political problems now, which are beginning to take shape. So we must leave behind the vision of the thing and move from two to three. I'm speaking a bit like Pythagoras now, but no, I don't have a mysticism of numbers, it's very simple. We must move out of me — one — that — two — subject, object — there needs to be a second subject who recognizes me as the owner of that.
45:06 And conversely, I recognize him as owner of his t-shirt, of his wife, possibly. This is important, what we're saying here. Marriage is a sacrament in the religious domain, and an institution. It is not an instinct. Mating, yes. Reproduction belongs to the order of nature, in the service of the species. Marriage is an institution. I'm not ranking them in terms of eminence or value.
45:39 It's not of the same order. There needs to be a third term that comes to validate the institution. That's why I wanted to draw a symmetry with the theoretical order that occupied us with Plato last time — the sensible world, then mathematics, then dialectic, then the contemplation of the sun — and why I wanted to draw this parallel with Rousseau. I didn't pick this Plato-Rousseau pairing at random.
46:11 I already told you that about twenty years ago, fifteen years ago — time flies — there was a very fine agrégation topic that came up in philosophy: 'City and decadence in Plato and Rousseau.' City and decadence in Plato and Rousseau. So my parallel isn't random. Both express the end of one world and the beginning of another. The end of the city-state, which was passing into the Empire under Plato; the end of the Ancien Régime, the end of several centuries of the feudal edifice, monarchical-feudal if you like — first feudal, then perfected in absolute monarchy.
46:48 You know that when something is perfect, it's on the verge of its decline. I'll please Caroline here because she likes this line, I know — it's La Bruyère who says that there is in art a point of perfection, as there is of goodness or ripeness in nature. Anyone who has ever tasted a perfectly ripe fig understands what La Bruyère means. Fig season is coming soon. There is in art a point of perfection — look at the comparison, borrowed from nature — as there is of goodness or ripeness.
47:23 That's why I was thinking there are fruits in nature. A point! Before, it's not quite there yet. The fig isn't yet fully sweet. After, it risks rotting. So there is a moment — it's beautiful, that idea. 'There is in art a point of perfection, as there is of goodness or ripeness in nature. He who feels it has perfect taste; he who loves this side or that of it has defective taste.' That's the 17th century. So there is a good and a bad taste, and matters of taste can be disputed with good grounds.
47:54 La Bruyère. There you go. Property is a right. It is recognized. We have moved from the binary to the ternary — from the subject-object relation to the relation of one subject, one object, a second subject. A third party. You see, we're not far off. Here, with Rousseau, there really is a break.
Humanity on its head: from the Franks to Clovis 48:26 To the point that Hegel had said, starting from Rousseau, that humanity walks on its head. This is truly a break, that. Walking on its head. He doesn't quite say that about Rousseau. He often links it to him, but he says it about the French Revolution. He says with the French Revolution. It was the audacity of having made humanity walk on its head. It's the ideas of freedom. It's ideas, it's in the head that the ideas are going to direct the world. That's extraordinary. The pharaoh, that was force. It was the one who had won the victory on the battlefield who reigned.
48:56 Ah, there were free men before. Yes, yes, yes. Free men, at the time that doesn't mean democracy. It means throat-cutters. The Franks. Francs. That means the Franks. Frei, in German. It means those who were not defeated in battle. The defeated one is a slave. And I, who won, I am the free man. Clovis was a Frank. He's a throat-cutter. But of course. A throat-cutter until he met Bishop Remy. Well, until he met Clotilde. Let's be clear.
49:26 I don't know. I don't know if music soothes manners. But apparently, women do. Because when he made this deal, you know, I'm willing to become Christian, but if your God makes me win the battle - and Clotilde had said, you won't marry me if you don't become Christian. He was used to plundering monasteries, convents, because there was gold there. Yes. That's the Vikings, the people who run the world today - the Vikings created the offshore civilization.
49:58 Listen carefully to what I'm telling you. But I'm serious, it's not a metaphor, offshore - you know, the longships, that's offshore. Tax havens, that's offshore. But yes. I'm opening an interesting little parenthesis. There are quite astonishing historical continuities. I have an admiration for all these civilizations. What would I be without the Nordic countries? That's not the question. But still, you have to see, they have this characteristic. Apparently there was a high density, I don't know, historically, demographically, at the time of the Vikings, and they fled these rather barren lands, these climates, to arrive in Deauville.
50:40 Look how lush, fertile the grass is, a beautiful woman, camembert, calvados, apples. And there, the kings of France had one of their rare brilliant ideas - not that French political leaders have many - but that one, that was a stroke of genius. It was to say to the Vikings, we'll give you this province, it's beautiful, watch out. But you protect us from your cousins, from the next waves. And that lasted until today. Because the Vikings were hard workers, mind you, they're hard workers. They developed it. Yes, that makes for good bridges, cheese, butter.
51:11 It's a fine achievement. It may seem like I'm going a bit fast, but that's the history of Normandy. Normandy means man from the North. Norway means the ways of the North. Norway, as they say in English. Norway, north way. I'm serious about what I'm saying there. So, that's force. Those are the warriors who came to subjugate the little Saxons over there, who were in England. I say that because when you read the Arthurian romances, the Saxons are always considered small and almost dark-skinned next to the great blond Vikings.
51:45 No, but I'm telling you, the romances. The Arthurian court tales, I'm not inventing anything. And then all of a sudden, Rousseau - that's madness. It's law that will reign, but since when? I go back to Clovis. We're not yet in Rousseau-style law, but it's not quite force anymore either. Yes, I go back to my distinction from antiquity. And to the Christian God who is never there, who is beyond.
52:15 You know the famous phrase said by the archbishop of Reims at the first anointing of what would soon be called the kings of France, right? You know that a king of France isn't legitimate unless he's had the anointing from the vial that's in Reims. Not just any vial, the one that's in Reims. That's how it is. It's a remnant of paganism within Christianity. It has to be that oil. It has to be remade from time to time. And what did Remy say, when baptizing him? Because the other one had won the battle.
52:45 So he says, that God there, I'm putting him in my pocket. "Bow your head, proud Sicambrian." We humiliate the warrior. "Bow your head, Sicambrian" - that's the tribe of the Franks. "Burn what you worshipped and worship what you burned." That's a conversion. That's a revolution. "Burn what you worshipped." The pagan idols, Wotan, Fricka, the Germanic gods, all that is finished. It's an auto-da-fé, we burn. A human sacrifice, that must be avoided.
53:15 And worship what you burned. Up until now you burned convents, you burned images of Christ and the saints. Now you have to worship them. There. I want to come back to it. The most important thing isn't all that, it's not a matter of religion. It's that the barbarian stopped being a nomad. He started digging. Because the monks told him "Ora et labora." Pray and work. And that makes Europe - yours, ours, our grandfathers'.
53:45 Because now apparently we have to trot around again and globalize. Well yes. When I was your age, they told the miners of Lorraine, "Well, listen, you need to move a bit, you need to adapt. Now coal - sorry, steel - is in Fos-sur-Mer. Lorraine is finished." Nicolas, you who are Breton, they tell Brittany, it's over, my friend. What do you say to that? Don't you agree? Actually, still. I remember, the guy was there, an old miner. Well, he said, "But sir, this is my homeland, Lorraine."
54:17 "And it's beautiful to make steel, sir, it was magnificent." You don't understand, you stupid journalist. Steel is beautiful. He said, "But if it's small, you have to do something else." Result: there's no more steel, neither in Fos-sur-Mer nor in Lorraine. I mention it in passing. For those who believed they were playing the game, who were foolish enough to believe it. Rousseau is the Newton of morality. We're saying that in the myth of the cave, there's a kind of continuity that has just broken.
The break between theoretical and practical; the feeling of virtue 54:49 with my intervention. With my recalling the intervention that was Rousseau's. Rousseau is this break that will still manifest itself in Kant as an unbridgeable abyss between what - between theoretical reason and practical reason. Nothing that I have learned in the theoretical order - I come back to what I said earlier - where an old wise man in a village in Africa might be better advice for knowing whether I should euthanize my grandmother or not than a professor of medicine or chemistry, etc. Even the chemist would agree.
55:21 He has competences in chemistry, that doesn't necessarily give moral competence. You can be an immense scholar and a scoundrel, or a very fine person. It's indifferent. These are not at all the same variables. They aren't concomitant. So, once again, Rousseau reminds us of that. The passage I read to you is nonetheless striking. One can't be more explicit. Don't expect to find here metaphysical dissertations. I'll skip the passage I read you and tell you this.
55:55 Nature has given us feelings and not enlightenment. And as we cannot, without injustice, be held accountable for what we have not received, we would have too much to complain about if so much knowledge were necessary to know virtue. You ask me what virtue is. Indeed, right at the start, he said you seek to embarrass me more than to instruct yourself by asking me what virtue is. I could tell you in two words that it is what no one can learn except from oneself, and that you will never know it if your heart has not already answered you. Besides, why raise a question so often and so well resolved?
56:25 Open Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, Epictetus, Antoninus, consult the virtuous Shaftesbury and his worthy interpreter. Do better still: study the life and discourses of the just man. Meditate on the Gospel, or rather let all books go back into yourself. Listen to that secret voice which speaks to every heart. We are not in the mathematical order. As much as I defended rationality in the order of answering the question "what can I know," let's not muddy the waters. As much, to answer the question "what must I do," we must still recall that here we are dealing with value.
57:02 And so, we will set aside morality, virtue, to turn toward subjective morality - what has been called, since the 19th century, objective morality: law. For example. I'll come back a bit here to the Social Contract. In other words, I derive the good - with all the question marks such a word can raise - down to the just, justice, the just and the unjust, which isn't quite the same thing.
57:34 I'm going to draw a parallel with Christianity in a moment. You see, meditate well on this diptych. Greek antiquity places extraordinary trust in rationality to solve all problems. The true, the just, the beautiful, the good - all of that goes together for a Greek. Christianity breaks that. The idea it expresses when it says "let the little children come to me, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." The little children - that's not the scribes, that's not the intellectuals, that's not the Nobel prize winners.
58:05 it's a different approach. So, when I speak of Christianity, I'm not at all talking here, of course, about the clerical institution. I told you once that Descartes embodied Christianity far more, even though he was fought against as an atheist by the Church, no less, with his mechanism. And yet the fact that he affirms the principle of inertia - that is, that to explain everything material around us, matter and motion suffice, without invoking souls, spirits, inclinations, virtues, all that fantasmagoria that existed in post-Aristotelian physics where heavy bodies fall downward because they want to reach their natural place, which is down below.
58:58 In fact, it's the equivalent, in the physical order, of the de-divinization brought by Christianity - the de-divinization of the here-below I was telling you about earlier. There. We have a quarter of an hour left, not before the end, but before the half. Since this is the last session, I would like, for once, not to end abruptly by sacrificing most of your questions because we're out of time, but instead to give a bit more room to your questions.
Modern Rousseau and the charge of totalitarianism 59:35 So, I'm telling you now because I still have a quarter of an hour of talking, try to think of your questions. So, it can be in any order, but if it doesn't relate exactly to what I said today, I'm just flagging that from the half hour on, the floor will be given to your questions. Let me come back to Rousseau so it's complete, because it's rare to have such a complex thought. It looks simple, reading Rousseau. It's extremely difficult. Why? Because precisely with him, we hold all the threads of what we've been recalling for several sessions among us, modernity.
1:00:10 I'm not speaking on the literary level, that's obvious - you find in every textbook the extent to which we find in Rousseau the first hints of the great romantic wave that would shake up Europe. I don't like the word "precursor," because a precursor, going by the word itself, is someone who does a little of what successors are going to do a lot. Rousseau sometimes goes much further than the Romantics and even foreshadows what comes after the Romantics. In terms of literary modernity, the body and impression and sensation in him often take up more space than sentiment.
1:00:44 There, that's why I made a small parenthesis - it's not my subject so I won't dwell on it too much. On the other hand, coming back to the very beginning of my talk, the holidays are coming soon. We are going to scatter, we're going to be the opposite of the political. Holidays are not the high place of the political, it's the moment when you're on a beach or in some corner of the countryside beside a stream, or waiting for my grandmother to finish the stews the way only she knows how to make them.
1:01:15 Yes, in the Poitou countryside. Yes, why are you laughing? That's good. I mean, each of us has our own personal, individual purposes, fortunately still. It's not like at the office, where you have to take others into account. Apparently in open spaces - thanks, Open Space - apparently there are disputes over who gets to be by the window. Yes, none of that anymore. There's the countryside, there's air for everyone.
1:01:51 Now, in Rousseau, you have both. That's why I'm insisting on Rousseau today. He's the man of the Social Contract, to the point that he's denounced by the Anglo-Saxons as the seed of modern totalitarianism. Even if some say that... But no, it's already in Plato. Come on, let me remind you of the Heideggerian sequence. The gulag was already in Lenin before Stalin. Besides, it was already in Marx. Besides, it's already in Hegel.
1:02:22 Besides, it's already in Kant, in Descartes, in Plato. What is there before Plato? Nothing. Because philosophy is the system - the one that never went back is Plato. Well, before him there are the pre-Socratics. There you go. So there, Heidegger - those guys, they're fine. Well yes, there are three lines from one, two and a half lines from another. Nostradamus - you can interpret, do whatever, you're safe. There's no cold, progressive necessity of the concept, it's like the rules of history.
1:02:56 There. I close that parenthesis. We hold everything with Rousseau. He's the man of the Social Contract, and at the same time - that's why I'm talking about holidays - no one has been so much a vacationer, that's a weak term, well it sounds a bit... no one has been so "out" as him. There. I'm alluding, of course, to the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Solitary - how can you write the Social Contract while being a solitary dreamer?
Question from the audience: natural goodness and the Social Contract 1:03:27 He's messing with us, this guy. The famous contradictions of Rousseau, right? We're going to resolve them today, that's why I'm dwelling on this. I promised Sébastien. Sébastien? Isn't Sébastien here? Thank you. You asked a very good question on Facebook. Can you sum it up? It's the one I put on Facebook. Sorry? It's the one I left on Facebook. Yes, yes, exactly. How do we go from one period... I saw an excerpt. Can you stand up, because Adam's powerful build is blocking your voice.
1:04:00 It's in the Discourse on Inequality, an early work, where he says - society corrupts man, who is naturally good. Does that seem a priori contradictory with the Social Contract? With the Social Contract. There, thank you. There are contradictions in Rousseau. There are. But that one, that's the one that runs diagonally through his whole body of work. How can he be the author who says everything is good coming from the hands of man - the absurdity, everything is good coming from the hands of the creator, everything degenerates in the hands of man.
1:04:32 So it's at his birth that man is good. I remind you that "nature" comes indeed from N-A-T, natal, to be born. The natural, in the language of representation, that of ideology, is not the nature of physics. It's what we have by birth. I tell you that to remind you that we are not born in nature. We humans, we are born - there was a pram. Even before the child was born, there was already the pram ready in the room. Do you see what I mean? That's not nature.
1:05:03 It's a world that has a history, that has a heritage. There is an always-already complex. An always-already complex. It's not a simple beginning. So this Rousseau, how do we go from this naturalist Rousseau to the one who goes as far as saying this - I brought this. It's the text I told you about in my brief reply. Where you'd say, that's not possible, that's not the same guy. Where Rousseau flat out makes the State speak.
1:05:35 The State, society. In response to the one who complains about it, who says, still, I'm losing my freedom in the collectivity. As individuals we are all indebted to one another. Well, look at that. There's the IMF saying we owe a debt to - not me - to Germany, to the IMF. Rousseau is the opposite. We are all indebted to one another. Schäuble owes me money.
1:06:06 That's what Rousseau is saying there. Madam Merkel owes you money. Or she owes some to the Greeks. But as a member of society, to which each owes everything. Besides, the price with which we all pay for every help we receive is itself a gift from society. Can a man possess anything without the cooperation and consent of others? Without this tacit contract they have made? Never was Rousseau clearer, even in the Social Contract itself, than - the Social Contract, which is imagined as some sort of imaginary ceremony where you sign the social contract.
1:06:37 No, it's a tacit contract that has existed since the dawn of time. That's what Rousseau was the first to understand. It's not a matter of what ought to be. We ought to make a society that works according to the terms of the contract. It's the contract that comes first. And when things go wrong, it's because it's being violated. But humanity would never have emerged if there had been only force. That's what Rousseau says. It's not the tacit contract... In the state of nature, nothing exists but what is necessary. And all the superfluous things we see among us is not the sum of the labors of individuals.
1:07:09 When I said "the superfluous," don't think he's thinking of luxury. The superfluous is when you put radishes on Sunday in a working-class or peasant family, gathered around the sausage. Or the other way around. To make a bit of a difference - it's Sunday, there are friends over. That's superfluous. I mean, from a nutritional point of view, what does it change? From a human point of view, everything is there, you agree? Still. And then you put a slightly nicer tablecloth than usual. That doesn't feed you any more. Biologically, it's not more.
1:07:42 Man feeds on man. That's what Rousseau is saying here. All anthropophagy aside. So, well yes, you'll tell me - I foresee it - about the disorders of the social state, where the public good serves as a pretext for so many evils. But one must distinguish the civil order from its abuses, and from the fact that not everyone gives back to society what they owe it. We cannot conclude that we owe it nothing, and it is not society we should blame if, doing nothing with what it gives us, we make ourselves unhappy by offending it.
1:08:19 One would think it's not the same man, right, Sébastien? So, but an advantage infinitely superior - now we come to what Rousseau judges the indispensable detour through the social - but an advantage infinitely superior to all physical goods, physical - I remind you that's still nature - and which we owe indisputably to the harmony of humankind, and that of achieving, through the communication of ideas - you understand, I waited for the last session to tell you this - that we don't converse together for nothing - the communication of ideas and the progress of reason all the way up to intellectual realms, of acquiring sublime notions of order, of wisdom and moral rectitude, of nourishing our feelings with the fruit of our knowledge - Rousseau, of whom it's said that he spends his time praising sentiment and belittling reason in favor of sentiment, affirms there, no less, that we must - the expression is clear - nourish our feelings with the fruit of our knowledge.
1:09:19 Do you remember the sun in Plato, which gave beings growth and nourishment. To nourish our feelings with the fruit of our knowledge, to raise ourselves through the greatness of the soul above the weaknesses of nature, and to equal, in certain respects, through the art of reasoning - we're reaching a limit here - the celestial intelligences. Finally, to be able, by dint of fighting, to conquer our passions - Rousseau, conquer our passions - to master man and imitate divinity itself.
1:09:49 Thus this continual exchange of care, help, and instruction sustains us when we can no longer sustain ourselves, enlightens us when we need to be enlightened, and places within our power goods of inestimable worth, which make us scorn those we no longer have. Those are the true compensations that console an honest man amid the misfortunes of nature's losses and society's abuses. I'll skip that passage.
1:10:19 Yes, look at this one instead. I believe, then, that in becoming a civil man - it's an impersonal statement - in becoming a member of a collectivity, I have contracted an immense debt with humankind, that my life and all the comforts I derive from it, from humankind, must be devoted to its service. I see further that if I can procure for myself a kind of exclusive well-being and some dubious pleasures by sacrificing everything to myself alone, I could only secure a state of peace and lasting happiness within a well-ordered society.
Abuses, regressions, and property called into question 1:10:51 This sacred duty that reason obliges me to recognize is not properly a duty from one particular individual to another, but it is general and common, like the right that imposes it on me. Now there's a word that comes up several times, and that's the word abuse. And that's a word he had already used—we're in philosophy, I'm obliged to question words in their literality—in The Social Contract, in a passage you've already cited, which is precisely the famous passage where he expresses the passage from the state of nature to the civil state.
1:11:21 And don't start thinking that 10,000 years ago, 10 million, 4 million years ago—apparently they've just found in Morocco the oldest Homo sapiens... if you follow the news a bit... Yes, the Moroccans have scored a point there. Apparently the Algerians are digging now to find an older one. Fair enough. Oh, and the Corsicans, we were left out. We're going to end up finding Homo bastiensis. I said that because the Corsicans boast of having invented writing and of having passed it on to the Mesopotamians out of charity.
1:11:51 I saw it in a bookshop in Bastia. So, don't think we're talking about the passage to the civil state as something that happened once—those who follow a bit what I say remember that I insisted on this once before. This passage to the civil state happens at every instant, right now, as we speak. At every moment, we are solicited by two different legislations.
1:12:22 Forgive me for always coming back to the most banal example, but it's because I have it at hand and don't need equipment or audiovisual material to illustrate it. But when I'm at table and I've told someone—usually a lady, because I was raised that way, you too I hope—please serve yourself first, while I'm hungry, no reason for it, the service was a bit slow, I'm starving. I hold back—well yes, there are two legislations, one of nature, I'm hungry, I want to eat, and one that comes from society. At every instant, we reproduce the passage to the civil state, or else the regression from the civil state to the state of nature.
1:13:01 When relations between men are once again made to depend on force rather than on right, that's a regression to force, which is the fundamental element of the natural order as we saw earlier. In fact, you know, each of these things taken separately—but you didn't see, we didn't see, we hadn't seen the connection between all of it. That's why I'm insisting on it today. It's one of the most fantastic—I'm not talking about Macron here, that would be, no, no, seriously, this goes back almost three generations.
1:13:31 Now that there's a regression compared to the point humanity had reached through struggles—it didn't fall from the sky. I'll open a parenthesis, but it's starting to fascinate me when people tell me they've had enough of privileges. Apparently pay-as-you-go pensions, negotiating by sector, all of that are privileges that the French are supposedly fonder of than others. Privileges—you know what that is, we made a revolution because of that, privileges. They're by birth. We weren't born with these things, they were conquered through hard-fought struggles, there were deaths in those battles.
1:14:05 How can these be called privileges? It's scandalous. Let me remind you. And when we go back—it's not the war of each against all, they teach you this in business schools. You have to be high-performing, destroy your competitors' skin. If it were a business school, it wouldn't be so bad, because if things go badly, daddy will step in and fix things. But when it's poor kids who left school after their BEPC and are competing against each other to see who'll get to be a salesman at Darty, and they're put in competition, it's far more serious.
1:14:38 That's what I call regressions. There are moments when you have to go through that. It's honorable for someone to take it upon themselves, to fight to assert themselves. What's not normal is that in the 21st century, we're still there, in the fifth-largest economic power in the world. That a Chinese worker who was still, until recently, stamping human manure into the ground with his feet, as was done not so long ago, as still happens in some remote regions of China—fine, I accept that he bypasses certain regulations, above or below, but still, crossing certain economic thresholds, it's scandalous that we've come back to that.
1:15:17 I'm not denouncing states of fact, I'm denouncing regressions. So the progression, to come back to it, is the one I was indicating a moment ago when I talk about, when I remind you what the rule of law is—and that's why Rousseau is so poorly regarded, in a way, within a certain dominant ideology, because he's the only one to question property rather than possession. Rousseau never said that if he came to power, he'd take your toothbrush.
1:15:52 That's possession. But the relation of property—what does the notion of social justice mean if property remains as it was? That's why he was the man to be brought down from the 18th century onward. Why did men of progress like Voltaire, like Diderot—why was Rousseau, for them, the most dangerous man? Because he was the only one to go all the way. He, whom they'll try to pass off as a conservative—curious, we find the same problems today.
1:16:22 We no longer really know who's the most reactionary or the most revolutionary. Red, brown, you've heard of all that. So as not to fall into that confusion, I go back to Rousseau. Rousseau was always clear. So I return to the man of The Social Contract and to the man of the Reveries. I've talked enough about the Contract in other talks, I won't insist, on property, on the fact that there's no vile nature and noble nature, there are no slaves by nature.
1:16:52 I say that because last time, to move quickly, Aristotle—he had read in Aristotle, Aristotle said there are men born to command and men born to obey. Ah, those are natures, ontologies, identities. You have the face of a slave, you can tell right away, not like me. Or the opposite, some people humble themselves. And Rousseau, commenting on this passage, says in The Social Contract that Aristotle was right, but he took the effect for the cause. He was right backwards.
1:17:23 Every man born into slavery is born to obey, that's certain. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape them. It's written in black and white in The Social Contract. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape them. Force made the first slaves, I keep quoting, their cowardice perpetuated them. You see, there's a lot of talk today about voluntary servitude. Force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them. And I'll make one last quotation, still from the same passage.
1:17:55 If there are slaves by nature—which unfortunately proves Aristotle right at the empirical level—it's because there were slaves against nature. You have to know how to introduce history where people wanted to see only biology. That's what makes him relevant today. There aren't Hutus and Tutsis, Corsicans and French, young and old, women and men, as fixed categories. There is a history. There are indeed differences in all of that, but differences of moment, not differences of nature.
The fifth walk: idleness on Île Saint-Pierre 1:18:27 So, I won't insist further, I return to the Reveries. The opposite. The fewer men I see, the better I feel. Let me summarize a bit. This is the reverie that culminates in the famous Fifth Walk, where he spent only a few weeks on a small island in the middle of Lake Bienne, where he took refuge in haste because his works were being publicly burned. A warrant was out for his arrest, meaning that if he were caught, he'd be seized, put in irons, and sentenced to death by the three greatest powers in Europe—Prussia, France, Austria.
1:19:03 And so he rushes to the Île Saint-Pierre in the middle of Lake Bienne. Well, actually he was the one in the middle—he's not always in the middle, but let's not overanalyze. We're not going to do psychoanalysis here. And there he spends a few weeks, but note this well, thinking he would spend his whole life there, that he was condemned—because if he crosses over, in ten minutes you reach Switzerland, it's not exactly the Pacific Ocean, Switzerland.
1:19:33 In ten minutes by boat, you reach the mainland. It's a tiny little island. And he thought he would stay there until the end of his days. He was more or less alone with his housekeeper, as he calls his wife, to whom he remained faithful his whole life, an illiterate woman, an innkeeper's servant to whom he remained faithful his whole life, Thérèse. I'll open a parenthesis for those who are great readers of Clouscard. Clouscard tells me, I should have done like Rousseau, married a good peasant woman. There, I'm quoting Clouscard at the end of his life—what Rousseau did wasn't stupid.
1:20:09 There you go. Instead of that, I went chasing Lacan's mistresses. Which is true. Well, it's epic. Well, listen, Don Quixote, according to Clouscard, whom I like a lot. So, closing the parenthesis—with his wife, the island's little governor, who would invite him from time to time for tea, with whom he did a bit of music, and he had nothing to do.
1:20:40 And when he says that there, in those periods, he was the happiest he had ever been in his life, and enjoyed a pleasure that no man of that century could imagine—he knows very well, he's being provocative, that he's talking about the century where pleasure is a value, the century of libertines. All you hear are people saying, me, pleasure, I know all about it, me, Casanova, me, the Marquis de Sade, pleasure, don't tell me... I could give you a whole speech on pleasure. And Rousseau says what this pleasure consisted of—it's his word—I would let all the men of this century try to guess, based on the nature of the life I led there.
1:21:14 Colon. Precious idleness, farniente. Rousseau, who elsewhere prescribes that one must learn a manual trade in order to free oneself from constraint and for the sake of social justice. And it's this sentence, one of the most beautiful ever written on the social level, when he asks that his pupil learn a manual trade. He says it's not a matter of learning a trade for the trade's sake, but to overcome the prejudices that despise it. Learning to be a cook, a carpenter, not just to earn a living but to overcome the prejudices with which people regard those who cook or make furniture.
1:21:49 You see? It's less about learning a trade for the trade's sake than to overcome the prejudices that despise it. That very same Rousseau then suddenly praises doing absolutely nothing, idleness, on an island. Corsican book-lovers like me will find this upsetting. Rousseau takes to the maquis, so to speak, as we'd say back home—but that's exactly what he does. And he reaches a state we'd almost call zen today. I won't quote it.
1:22:19 You know, the ebb and flow of that water, its continuous sound but swelling at intervals, plunged me into a delicious reverie. An oral metaphor, like a nursing infant. A delicious reverie in which night often surprised me without my even noticing—a loss of the sense of time, to the point that when called by the hour and the agreed signal, Vincent calling me for soup—to the point that when called by the hour and the agreed signal, I could not tear myself away from there without effort. Everyone's going to say, well, that's disgraceful. The citizen of the new society is someone wallowing in drowsiness by the lakeshore.
"Whom they have cut off": an imposed solitude 1:22:53 Rousseau reminds us, yes, but... And here comes the passage that unifies all the contradictions. In what he says, I don't offer—although I say it's the happiest moment of my life, I don't offer it as an example. Because don't forget I'm talking about someone who was in a situation where he could no longer hope to do anything useful, either for himself or for his fellow men. And that's where he says—outside of society, no, I'm confusing it with a passage from Émile, excuse me—it would not even be good, in the Fifth Walk, for the men of today, plunged into this kind of reverie, to grow disgusted with the activities their lives prescribe as their duty.
1:23:38 So he says, don't do it like that. One must produce if you want there to be social justice—as Clouscard says, there are two social classes in world history. This is the last session so I'll go quickly. There are ten thousand if you split hairs, but there are always the same two. There's the class that produces because it doesn't consume, and the class that consumes because it doesn't produce. The advantage of this criterion is that it's measurable. It's not subjective, not moral invective, there aren't bastards—there's the class that produces because it doesn't consume, and consumes because it doesn't produce.
1:24:11 So Rousseau isn't praising the parasite who sinks into idleness—no, no, it's in the reverie while people feed him, while Thérèse does the dishes, and while peasants grow the plants they feed on. So he does say clearly, it would not even be good, I quote him literally, in the present constitution of things, for them to grow disgusted with those activities which their lives prescribe as their duty. But—and here is the decisive passage—an unfortunate man who has been cut off from the commerce of men can find in this state compensations that neither fortune nor men could ever take away from him.
1:24:51 And I had, remember, for those with good memory, underlined—what, in the sentence, for those with good memory—which word had I underlined, I asked you mentally to underline, at least twelve times, twelve, sorry—there, that's attentive people—the word 'that,' not 'an unfortunate man who withdrew himself' the way Lamartine often did, on the mountain, in the shade of the old oak, at sunset sadly I sit—that's the romantic pleasure of solitude, Lamartine, he's an aristocrat, I leave my château, I've got nothing against that, I like it a lot, and then from time to time I need to be alone, solitude, I look at my estate, I look at autumn, the yellowing foliage scattered on the lawns—that's not Rousseau. He didn't want to be alone. An unfortunate man who has been cut off from the commerce of men—me, the most sociable of men, me, the author of The Social Contract, forced to take refuge, to become a Robinson Crusoe against his will—but an unfortunate man cut off from the commerce of men can find in this reverie compensations.
No tomorrows to sing about: hominization at every instant 1:26:01 that neither fortune nor men could ever take from him—there you have it all together, you have the right to go on holiday now, you've earned it. Fortunately there are moments when we're outside all social relation, and that's when we think most deeply about social relation, even without thinking about it—and that's what makes Hölderlin say, and I'll conclude with this before your questions, when he's mad, when all of Germany parades before him and he no longer recognizes anyone, he writes in a fragment: only now do I live, I understand man now that I live far from him and in solitude. There, good holidays—now I await your questions. First, there's something in your question, implicit, that I reject—it's not your thesis, but interpreting it this way—me, I don't wait for tomorrows that sing, because you said, what patience it takes to wait for the ideal society—that's what you said, I don't know, because a man's life is a man's life, or else there are only sacrificed generations throughout history as long as there's no ideal society, meaning the problems aren't solved—in that case it's a sacrifice of all generations, that's not serious, that's not how things should be framed.
1:27:11 that's why I said earlier—it's not quite the same thing but there's a connection—that the passage from the state of nature to the civil state didn't happen a few million years ago, it happens at every instant, every time parents raise a child they make it pass from the state of nature to the civil state, they relaunch the process of hominization of the animal, it's not only genetic, man—that's what I mean, if suddenly I'm a feral child, I mean people will doubt whether I'm human, because they'll find me, I don't speak, I scratch as soon as anyone approaches—you see, we forget the process of hominization, it's not only genetic, it's above all, as we felt earlier, the commerce of intelligences, the subject-to-subject relation, and not merely a relation of subject to carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, or to bacteria—so I insist on that, first of all, it was implicit in the question, there's a relation.
1:28:23 of justice with respect to the present state of things—at every moment in history. We're not going to get depressed in 1905 because I don't have a car, when cars were extremely rare—that wasn't fair to expect. Nor could I say the same for running water, for electricity, etc. Precisely, your question brings me back to the notion of abuse, which I like to tackle, which I glossed over a bit with the story of the reverie—it brings me back a little to when Rousseau says, in that passage where he says we gained everything in passing—morally—from the state of nature to the civil state, let me recall the passage: this passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct—look at the rigor of that passage—and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked. Although in this new state he deprives himself of several advantages
1:29:33 that he holds from nature, he gains such great ones in return—there's a real balance here, colon: his faculties are exercised and developed—it's extremely concise, for example language means that instinct becomes thought—his faculties are exercised and developed, his passions are ennobled, sexuality becomes love, marriage, or Eros as we saw earlier, his whole soul is elevated to such a point—you get a crescendo here, you really get the impression it's a shame this wasn't done before, the passage to the civil state, we gained everything—and then suddenly there's this grave note that warns of the negative aspect, very rightly touched on in your question—his whole soul is elevated to such a point that if the abuses—and there's the word—of this new condition did not often degrade him below the state he came from—that's serious, what Rousseau is saying—how can one be below the animal? Here Rousseau develops his theory of evil—there is no evil in nature, no good either, there is no evil—I'll give an example
1:30:45 of wild dogs in the African savanna devouring the fetus as it's being born from the famous running wildebeest herd in the savanna—it seems horrifying to us, especially as a child, she has so little to feed—there's neither good nor evil in that, everyone does what they can based on the balance of force as we saw earlier, whereas in man, the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below the state he came from. If I go back over this syntactically complex sentence—you see, it was in the indicative, then everything shifted to the conditional and the hypothetical—his whole soul, his passions are ennobled, his faculties develop, his whole soul is elevated to such a point that if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the state he came from, comma—and now I say the rest—he ought to, he ought to ceaselessly bless the happy moment that tore him forever from the state of nature. He ought to—but thanks to your question, you remind me that we still can't bless it, I don't know if we gained anything, given the state, the ravages that human evil wreaks in history. He ought to bless
1:31:55 ceaselessly the happy moment that tore him forever—for Rousseau it's irreversible, exactly as in the Bible, you know, the return to earthly paradise is forbidden by the angel with the flaming sword—one can leave it, one cannot go back in—he ought to ceaselessly bless, he ought to bless ceaselessly the happy instant that tore him forever away—the sentence ends with a fall, a Rousseau-style antithesis—and which, from a stupid and limited animal, made an intelligent being and a man. One cannot be more precise than Rousseau at that point on the fact that the anthropological comes from the civil state, before the anthropological there was only the zoological—a stupid and limited animal, which is not wicked, as Spinoza rightly noted, he worked a lot on this problem, you know Hobbes before Spinoza had said his most famous phrase, bravo, homo homini lupus, isn't that right, man is a wolf to man—to which Spinoza responds, with that humor that is his alone and that depth, homo homini Deus, man is a god to man—we're not going to argue with Spinoza, well anyway, look at the Middle East
Homo homini deus: recognition, from Spinoza to Hegel 1:33:06 it's a matter of terrorism, we could say that—the advantage with Spinoza is that his phrase contains what Hobbes says, while the reverse isn't true—it's because man is a god to man that he is monstrous, it's because man expects enormously from man—what you're saying is a perfection, you see the connection—and that announces what we saw earlier with Rousseau, that it's recognition by the other that humanizes me—that's what preceded, what he'll later make Hegel say, a bit more heavily—it's German, this one, he's a Germanophile—a self-consciousness is in and for itself only insofar as it is in and for itself for another self-consciousness—well yes, it's written that way in the Phenomenology, and fortunately he adds, comma, that is, insofar as it is recognized—there's a translation, anerkannt, recognized, not known—let's leave knowledge to science—that's the progress we've made since last time, Plato's myth of the cave—let's leave the itinerary of knowledge to the scientists, but we philosophers, let's keep fighting for the recognition of knowledge, for the defense of knowledge
1:34:16 against barbarism—that's how we're not in the regressions, agreed—knowledge alone doesn't suffice to establish value or law, agreed, but it's indispensable to leave barbarism behind. So somewhere I like Goethe's formula, which reconciles Voltaire and Rousseau—Voltaire, who insists on enterprise, a bit like what we'd call today—he had silk stockings manufactured on his estate at Ferney in Switzerland, and he used the marquises among his friends who came to visit him in the countryside to promote them at Versailles—you see, same entrepreneur—one must cultivate one's garden, that's the great conclusion of Candide, which is magnificent, let it be said in passing—there, one shouldn't wait for a perfect society—well, so he has the economic mind, Rousseau the political mind, so I conclude with Goethe—with Voltaire a world ends, with Rousseau a world begins, both are needed to create modernity—Voltaire was needed, the termite that gnaws at the building, which is negative, which contributes
Leisure, division of labor and freedom as the meaning of history 1:35:26 to destroying the old world, and afterward Rousseau is needed, once that world has collapsed, to build something on top of it—it's the opposite, you're raising a difficulty called a circle in logic—to arrive at theoretical efficiency, material problems must be resolved first, otherwise—that was my joke earlier—what do you call that, stop, it's too late—one must have gained distance from the urgencies of action—but at the same time, and here you're perfectly right, I hadn't said it earlier, so that's a very good question—once we've stepped back from the urgency of action, aren't we influenced by that comfort, isn't our thinking bent, a 'tropism,' tropos means curve in Greek, aren't we already on the slope of ideology rather than theoretical relevance? I think I'm not betraying your question—well, the problem has existed for a long time, since Hegel often quotes a phrase of Aristotle, it goes back that far, a pre-Marxian phrase of Aristotle, well now, that doesn't happen often—yes, presociological.
1:36:37 Aristotle as sociologist—you can probably guess this phrase—you don't see—in Egypt, let me give the beginning—Aristotle says it's in Egypt that mathematics began to develop, because there the priestly caste enjoyed leisure—that's exactly your question, Aristotle had seen that—it's not the farmer sweating on the soil, hurrying because the first rains are coming, who has to work the land quickly so it gets fertilized—he's not the one who's going to discover the laws of geometry, that is, the measurement of the earth, not the working of the earth—it's not geology either, in depth—it's on the surface, the measurement of the land, we content ourselves with surveying, that is, pacing it out, for man readily measures by the span, as Hölderlin says in his magnificent poem, the step of man is the measure of the world—yes, Pharaoh's scribe, I think I talked about this in a talk on whether history is a subject, as I was asked to speak about at Saint-Dizier
1:37:47 let me remind you that originally history did not have a properly theoretical aim, you're right—it wasn't to know the truth of what happened that the first historians began to write—the first historians, it's the scribe who said, Pharaoh gave the Hittites a thrashing—that's the beginning of history, because he's the most beautiful, he's the best, he's the strongest, and he has Amon-Ra with him, or the goddess—you said, Nicolas will correct me, you know Egypt well—there, and he's the beloved child of Hermes and Osiris for those who like syncretic religions—so this is a roundabout way to answer your question, there's a division—let's speak in more modern, more Marxian terms—there's a necessary division of labor, Marx says, the young Marx in particular, the first social division of labor—finish my sentence—it's man and woman—you see the gender problem doesn't date from today, he was perfectly aware of it
1:38:59 and the first men, even more aware than him, I mean our Neanderthal ancestors, that in the eighth month of pregnancy the woman wasn't going to follow the men chasing the mammoth—it's just not possible—so there's a division of fact, it's not that there were horrible male chauvinists who said, you, you're going to stay there and take care of the cooking and the kids—no, that's Caroline Fourest types, those are privileged women who fight against poor men—I don't like the feminism of rich women who resent poor men who veil their wives in the dust of the deserts—if we want to unveil them, we just have to give them the standard of living of San Francisco, that'll be solved quickly—when the wife comes home with her Cadillac, with a job because she's an engineer and earns three grand, looking for her husband, he's not going to say 'I've got the kids,' no, he won't be able to be Corsican anymore, the guy—no, I'm serious. So, there's a division of labor that was imposed at the start by hardship—we mustn't forget the original tragic dimension, otherwise we understand nothing about history—on the contrary, it's good news, history is destined
1:40:10 in principle, if not in its actual unfolding, to move us away from that hardship—the more man increases his technicity, the more distance he gains from the constraints imposed on him by being—I say being, more generally than nature here, isn't that so—illness, the gap, there will always be entropy, there will always be decay, all the more reason to make every possible effort to prevent the tooth of chance, as Parmenides said, the idea of becoming, from lodging itself in man's designs, of course—so at the start there is a necessity, history—we didn't pass from the state of nature to the civil state, from necessity to freedom, on a December 31st at midnight four million years ago—that's what I'm saying—that's where we see that the notion of history matters—so you see, I'll now answer your question with a formula you know well: the Orientals know that one is free, the Greeks know that some are free, the moderns know that all are free—it takes time, let me recall
1:41:21 let me recall that in this phrase, 'the Orientals' doesn't mean geographical Orientals—the Hegelians never said that Orientals are condemned to ignore freedom entirely, or to reserve it only for the King of Kings, or Pharaoh, or the Emperor of China—no, these are historical Orientals, meaning those who were well ahead of our smoky Gallic huts a few thousand years ago—there you go, so there is a meaning to history, that meaning is freedom, it's the only way to assign history a meaning that is not only non-totalitarian but the very opposite of totalitarian—freedom—but we must ensure there is the maximum number of free individuals—but for that, we have to break free from the constraints that existed at the start—but they are there at the start, hence the misunderstanding of those who go back toward the origin: the further back toward the origin we go, the more constraints we'll find—are you done, Jean?
1:42:17 Jean brings us back to profound truths. No other questions? We can have a quick question, in that case I invite you... well, I wish you all the best, good vacation. Thank you all.
