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Socrates and apoliticism: the question raised 0:00 Hello Dominique. Good evening Philippe. Thank you for being online again this evening to complete the answers to all the questions that came in after Workshop 2. So we're going to start right away with a question from Bachir Shanker that he asked on November 22, 2018.
0:32 I have a question that's been nagging at me. Socrates, and not only the Platonic Socrates — see on this subject the book by Jean Humbert, for example — is generally regarded by many progressive rationalists as one of the founders of their mental attitude, in its historicity as well as, so to speak, in its eternal typology. Now Socrates, although he considered his action in the city to be eminently political, wanted to be politically neutral and passive, thus apparently introducing the idea that true politics does not lie in politicized activism, according to the codes inherited and established in his time, but is a way of bringing debate to bear on the founding discourses current in the city.
1:18 Can we not conclude from this that what today is called apoliticism — including abstention, the rejection of the accepted forms of political engagement — can be more political than stereotyped activism? What is the point of view of a Hegelian and a Marxist like Mr. Pagani on this way of posing the problem? Socrates and apoliticism. Thank you in advance.
1:48 Thank you Philippe, thank you Bashi, I believe. Yes. And for this long, well-developed, well-documented question. So, this isn't to brush part of the question aside, but let me say right away, since I said it as a preliminary remark at the start of this season on the revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Lenin, that I am not, once again, placing myself within the genre of history of ideas.
2:22 while saying that I have the greatest respect for that discipline. So it's not at all as a... it's not at all as a detractor that I say this, there's no contempt at all, far from it. Simply, it's not at all... first because it's not my area of expertise, there's a whole host of specialists there, in every case. Well, there are some notions about it, but I mean, nobody is a specialist in the history of ideas in general, one is a specialist in Leibniz, a specialist in Saint Augustine, in Spinoza, in whomever you like, in Maine de Biran, but not in the history of philosophy in general, one shouldn't be megalomaniac.
3:12 So it's not my... I'll speak the way one does in a CV, it's not my area of expertise. All the more so since the character of Socrates — the character Bashi is alluding to, that is, since he cites research work at that level — set against that of Plato, that of Xenophon, since those are the two main written testimonies we have, Plato and Xenophon, but there's also Aristophanes, etc., is a character about whom the little historical knowledge I have convinces me that the question is extremely complex and leads to extremely contradictory results.
4:00 For example, Aristophanes' Plato — I mean, sorry, Aristophanes — who, to my knowledge, is the earliest in the Socratic doxography to have written testimony about the character Socrates, since Socrates himself, as we know, it's never useless to recall, wrote nothing. This man who caused the discipline he initiated, philosophy, to flow with ink for millennia, more than many other disciplines, did not leave half a line in writing. And not, as is my case, out of some impotence or weakness or a somewhat retractile attitude toward writing, but quite deliberately, indeed explained by Plato in quite a few passages.
4:48 That writing serves memory less than it serves recollection, for example. That's not another subject, I won't dwell on it. So, the historical Socrates, I mean, matters little to me — is there a history outside of writing? That's where we see the problem rebound, isn't it? And so, when I cite Socrates, I am within Plato. There you go. Plato did after all spend a long time in Socrates' company. I'm not saying his testimony is 100% reliable, but still, I don't see why it would be any more suspect than that of all the other witnesses who have left us traces.
5:27 and above all, I mean, I'm speaking of Plato's Socrates, the way one speaks of, I don't know, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. I'm pushing it a bit far there, but deliberately, to make the point. So now let me answer the question on its substance, which is extremely interesting, since it concerns the political engagement of the philosopher, broadly speaking. I do mean the philosopher, but not this or that particular philosopher.
The Seventh Letter: philosophy born from a political failure 5:58 With Socrates, it's the philosopher. That's where I agree with myself. And I will recall what I've already mentioned in several workshops, in a rather scattered way, but it bears reaffirming with the utmost force. It's that the first written system of philosophy that has come down to us, that is, the Platonic corpus, includes, besides the dialogues, a series of letters, and among these letters, the famous Seventh Letter, a letter written to his own people, where he recounts, of course, his political odyssey, his unfortunate and dramatic odyssey in Sicily, since he went there to act as consultant to the king of Syracuse, the tyrant of Syracuse, as one said at the time — though the word didn't yet have the pejorative connotation it would later acquire — Dionysius, who had summoned him on the strength of his reputation to serve as advisor, and then, once Plato got into concrete matters, Dionysius saw that being a Platonist was costing him a great deal, and, to move quickly,
7:10 he got angry, and sold Plato into slavery — not very nice for the consultant. Well, it's not entirely dramatic, since Plato belonged to an aristocratic family in Athens, he had money, his friends bought him back, I'll go quickly — and in the end, all the better for us, this story, I'd say selfishly, since it's this failure — I'm getting to it now — this political failure that Plato details with such force and precision in his famous Seventh Letter, where he says quite explicitly that it's from this political failure that he, as he puts it, turned toward philosophy: 'while my eyes remained fixed on politics, I was, as it were, compelled to turn away toward philosophy.'
7:57 There you go. So, for me, nothing is less apolitical than Plato's thought. But no, and this I don't... There's an ambiguity — I don't say this as a reproach, we are within ordinary language, the one I use, the one all philosophers use, natural language, to speak as linguists do, which is one of the least codified codes there is, full of ambivalence, isn't it? I'm not talking about a particular language, I'm talking about language, about what is common to all languages.
8:28 In every language, we say somewhere that the sun rises, even though it's a metaphor, it's poetry, we're not doing astronomy. It isn't the sun that rises, it hasn't set, it's rather we who move. Well, let's be serious. Given the ambiguity I'm talking about, which is inherent in natural language, I remain uncertain about the precise meaning of Bashi's question, as to whether, by 'the political,' he means the element I've just discussed — which makes Plato's concern eminently political, upstream, since there would have been no activity as philosopher and writer of dialogues without his political failure, and downstream, since these dialogues lead, in a first stage, to the Republic, which closes off the early dialogues, to go quickly, and lead, as the ultimate dialogue, to the Laws, the Laws, the final dialogue of the old Plato.
9:33 So, is it in that sense that he means politics, or rather in the party-political sense, which I don't necessarily connote pejoratively — why would I reproach it, since Bashi calls me a Hegelian, which I don't think is an insult in his mouth at all — but I mean, let me point out that I am neither a Hegelian, nor a Marxist, nor a Rousseauist, even if there are few thinkers I feel as close to as these three, for example. Isn't that so? We're in agreement on that.
Ancient determination and modern indetermination in Hegel 10:03 But I mean, I don't take each of them 100%. Otherwise I would be doing history of philosophy precisely. I would just be a mere repeater — a different genre, one I respect, but not mine. So let me make clear here that in Hegel's political thought, which Bashi seems to know quite well, it seems to me, Hegel often returns to this opposition between the ancient and the modern conception of determination.
10:36 Where am I heading with this? Taking a side, joining a party. Here I move on to party politics, in the sense that is sometimes, after all, defensible. Hegel doesn't take sides for one or the other. What are the one and the other? Let's be clear in terms of content. There is the modern positioning, associated by Hegel — we won't go back over all of it, one would have to look at the system — with the Christian era, with Romanticism, etc.
11:10 All that goes together on the same side for Hegel, broadly speaking. That is, it's characterized by indeterminacy — determination characterized by indeterminacy — and infinity. It's, let's say, a viewpoint closer to the category of essence — I'm speaking here of logical categories — than to the category of being. Whereas in antiquity, particularly Greek and Athenian antiquity, it's quite precise, far from that indeterminacy — value lies on the side of what is finite, determinate, complete, of which the city gives the best example.
11:51 Not only because a temple is always more square, more rectangular, more determinate, than air, sea, sun and light — the human world, that of the city in general. Fly over the Amazon by helicopter and you first see the canopy stretching into infinity, it's magnificent, it's not a question of value. And then suddenly you see a clearing with an oval or a circle — on the left, the men's house, on the right, the women's house, a whole systematic order and state of determination that you don't find in the indefinite profusion of natural teeming.
12:33 So, to come back to the ancient viewpoint, everything happens as if, for Hegel, the classical, Greek, viewpoint — from an aesthetic and historical point of view, even though he practically never uses the word, because he calls it the ethical world — is characterized, in contrast to Romanticism, Christianity and infinity, by the affirmation of a determination, which is going to be called, in our classical theatre — I'm thinking of French theatre of the 17th century, for example — for which nobody is unaware, if I take the example of Racine, it's even more evident, that for this theatre, the Greeks are an unsurpassable, indeed unattainable, model.
13:13 At best one can equal them, as one draws closer to an asymptote, but certainly never surpass them, the Ancients, as it was said. Now, what characterizes this theatre? Character. Each character is thoroughly enclosed within a character-type. Hermione's jealousy, Andromache's faithfulness, Phaedra's passion to the point of blindness, Hippolytus's shyness toward everything worldly, etc.
13:54 Each time, the hero is set within an almost timeless identity, a bit like La Bruyère's Characters. We can clearly see the Ancien Régime, where there was a place for each thing, each thing has its place, and this place is, for a kind of eternity, fixed within its definitive contour. That, really... I'm deliberately overstating it. It's within limits that we see things best. So why this long detour? Because taking sides is committing oneself, investing oneself in a part.
Taking sides: Tartuffe, Timbaud and Descartes' prudence 14:26 I'm deliberately playing on the word. Off by one vowel. Investing oneself in a part, at the expense of the rest, implicitly. Take Tartuffe, who is the character of the devout man, the false devout man, of course, the devout man. When he says, 'to be devout, one is no less a man,' that's a good illustration of what I'm trying to distinguish here. Because my character is to be devout, but still, there is in me, beyond this precise determination, the fact that I am somewhat like everyone else.
15:00 At that level, I am still, after all, a man. Well. With his overwhelming libido. And unavowed. And therefore repressive toward the libido of others. Like today's ecology. I say this because there's much talk in our streets, our people waking up, about punitive ecology. I'm pleased there's now this epithet that lets me indict the ecology that is not an indictment of all ecology.
15:32 Far from it. There. That's another subject, so I'm closing that parenthesis. But it was good to get out of the puritanism that comes to us from countries with a puritan, Protestant culture, which dominates the world. I mean, it's not entirely a coincidence, but still, I mean, pure, upright, purism. Religious fundamentalism, Catholic fundamentalism, Protestant fundamentalism, Muslim fundamentalism, fear of pollution in ecology, that is, of the stain, of defilement.
16:07 Well, I said I was closing that door. Investing oneself in a party, in that sense — and this is the end of my big parenthesis on the dialectic of the indeterminate and the determinate and of character — in that sense, it is not necessarily pejorative to practice, not only as a philosopher, political reflection. I think I've shown with Plato that it is essential, indeed at the very principle — in the double chronological sense of Plato's origin and of what he set rebounding at practically every moment of the history of thought — but beyond that, party politics, which can sometimes even be heroic.
16:53 I'm thinking of Jean-Pierre Timbaud, a Communist militant who, before the Nazi firing squad — I say Nazi on purpose, you'll see why I don't say German — uttered one of the finest lines perhaps in the history of politics. There, at the moment the bullets were about to crackle: 'Long live the German Communist Party.' There's an example of commitment. Now, one can perfectly well understand being anti-communist, I'm not saying... But I say, what a lesson in politics! I don't hold it against you as a German, I don't call you a Boche, all right?
17:26 I fight against Nazism and one day other Germans will avenge me. Long live the German Communist Party. Magnificent! So, that kind of engagement, yes, yes, insofar as... insofar as the share of Hegelianism he attributes to me, which I accept readily provided I'm not locked into it, or of Marxism, even Leninism. Everyone knows I don't go much further than that.
17:59 Even if my two — well, let's say three — favorite heads of state of the twentieth century are Hô Chi Minh, Castro, and Sankara. There. I'll show you that when I speak of Leninism, it goes beyond the death of Lenin, of course. There. That's how I answer him. For me there is an essential complicity, whether the philosopher himself perceives it or not. I'm thinking of Descartes, where it doesn't appear quite as clearly as it does in other philosophers.
18:30 He indeed dodged the issue with his story of provisional morality, with a subtlety all his own. And then, the Discourse on Method was published in 1637. In 1636, Galileo had been condemned. I understand he might show some caution. He knew who was keeping tabs on him. It wasn't yet called wiretapping, the NSA, or the secret services. At that time it was called the Inquisition.
19:01 The party of the devout, who preferred me. So, even apart from this complicity, inherent, I recall, in philosophy throughout its course, I do not deny that one can be a philosopher and commit oneself in a partial way — partial, I'm deliberately playing on the root, on the 'part,' and hence on 'party' — provided it is done in a heroic manner.
19:40 Yes, there are also schemes, and pals and rogues, as has been said elsewhere. But, there, let me take the opportunity to point this out in passing: provided that the philosopher, that his thought, his reflection, the dynamic element in his course, is never locked up within that party. And here I'm not referring to Marx, nor to Hegel, nor to Plato, nor to Rousseau, I'm referring here to Merleau-Ponty, who wrote definitive things — a foolish word in philosophy, but admirable — in his In Praise of Philosophy, precisely.
Merleau-Ponty: the self, the true, others 20:22 Where he returns at length to the relationship between Socrates and the city. I'm sure Bashi knows this text. Where he does draw up the balance sheet of Socrates' complex relations with the city. Socrates is, after all, condemned to death by the city. Paradox, scandal — a scandal for the young Plato. It's for the young Plato the fact that the most just man in Athens was condemned by Athens, and this scandal that turned him away from politics and led him into that immense detour, my dear friend, as he says in the Republic — the detour called philosophical inquiry.
21:08 Now, Socrates — the paradox reaches its height when we see that he spends his time defending the value of the law, the law of the city — not Galileo's law, I make that anachronism on purpose, there were no physical laws yet at the time, but rather what Callicles in the Gorgias calls natural law, which he opposes to common law. Common law is already pre-Nietzschean, isn't it, what Callicles says — it's for the poor slaves, well, this idea of inferior beings that we, the democrats, the progressives, all that, the collectivists, we have — one must read the Gorgias, Callicles — I'm not interpreting or forcing things, at the Élysée — with the same argument as Nietzsche, that the threat of punishment after death and all that are spells cast on us to frighten us, like children we scare to dissuade them from what?
22:07 From exercising their strength, since the best are the strongest. In short, Callicles affirms a continuity between natural law and the law of the city. For Callicles, little Nazi-in-the-making, the laws of the city must be an extension of the laws of nature, that is, above all, of force — even though he stammers when Socrates tries to question him about what he calls force, about what constitutes physical force. And when Plato shows him that the city as a whole is physically stronger than a single individual, 'Ah yes, that's true, well, but no, but it's not only about physical force, there's the strength of intelligence, he's cleverer, you see' — very topical, that, the winners, the losers, in short.
22:45 So there, the law that Socrates defends throughout his period of preaching, if I may put it that way — I take the word here in the logical sense, not only the religious one — is the law of the city, as opposed to that other so-called law of nature, as in the whole Greek world. I had an architect friend, now unfortunately deceased, who told me — I was very young at the time — he told me: 'The right angle, the noblest conquest of man.'
23:17 He spoke as an architect, but it's very Greek. The noblest conquest of man is the right angle. Go find that in nature. There. I maintain that position. The philosopher has a twofold relationship to politics. He has it essentially as a philosopher, in the strict sense of the word 'philosophy,' as Plato would say. And Merleau-Ponty — so let me finish by drawing on those fine pages of In Praise of Philosophy, which exists in paperback, by the way — Merleau-Ponty sums up this whole relationship between Socrates and the city in a superb alternative.
24:00 he says: 'There are three poles: the self, the true, the others.' The self, the true, the others. If you don't take all three, if you take only one — or two, isolating them, leaving a third one aside — it's total failure. So let's spell that out a bit quickly. Or, by way of absurdity, let's take two and show that this doesn't correspond to what the philosopher is. Let's take the self and the others, but without the true.
24:32 Ah well, that exists, it's called opinion. There, I'm at the café, chatting with friends, the point there isn't truth, it's showing off a bit, bragging, buying a round, flirting, talking about the Marseille–Bastia match — that's fine, I have nothing against it, far from it. But it's not the place where truth unfolds, neither scientific nor philosophical nor whatever you like. It can, it can surface now and then, here or there, there can be the orthè doxa, as they say, the right opinion, by chance, by contagion, but that's not the purpose pursued in this kind of gathering.
25:04 So much for the self and the others, without the true. But now, the self and the true, but without the others — ah, that exists too, it's the sacred, it's yoga, in contemplation for hours at the foot of the Himalayas. 'Allein mit sich, allein mit Gott' — 'alone with oneself, alone with God' — as it's said, isn't it, in Unazanim [uncertain reference], the powerful Homers, who were the first to know this, spoke alone with God. I respect that, it's called the religious. We are not in philosophy.
25:34 'I have a vision in the desert' — I am not doing philosophy. There I am, alone, with the true, because it seems to me to be the absolute and the true, beyond all truth even. The others are not there. Which makes me think of even Zarathustra — these are the opening lines: 'When he had reached his thirtieth year, Zarathustra withdrew into the mountains. There he lived for a long time in the company of goats and goatherds. Then, one day, he climbed to the summit of the mountain and addressed the sun in these words,' the great star.
26:08 Let's say the sun is the true, in Merleau-Ponty's demonstration. To the great star, what would your glory be if you had none of those you illuminate? The Zarathustras came back down toward the others. It is true that, since it is Nietzsche who writes, he concludes, thus began the decline of Zarathustra. So there you have it, the self, the true, the others. I spoke of the self and the others without the true, opinion, the corner-café chatter. The self and the...
26:39 Sorry, the self and the others without the true, corner-café chatter, opinion. The self and the true without the others, the sacred, the religious, contemplation. Respect—but we're not in philosophy anymore. We've found. We're no longer searching. We're no longer questioning words. There remains only one combination, namely, the others and the true without the self.
27:09 That exists too. I won't dwell on it, but it's madness. A self that is excluded, and others, and the true. The madman being the alienus, the other, the one who cannot enter into communication. There you have it. So I thank Bashy for her essential question, since according to my answer it touches—though I quite understand it could be discussed—on the very essence of philosophy.
An end that man assigns to himself 27:40 There you go. I think... Do you want to move on to the second question? On Skype, yes, but if you were watching Facebook you'd see it. There you go. Yes. So, it's a question—actually it's a follow-up, it's a question you already worked on last time, and, listening back to the answer you gave, you wanted to add something.
28:15 So, I'll quickly repeat the question Raphaël asked on November 22, 2018. I would be interested to know Mr. Pagani's opinion on a phenomenon that seems to bring together, in theory, a fairly large share of the philosophers making up the historical and philosophical division he carried out, namely the Bildungsroman. It obviously includes Rousseau's Émile, to which Goethe's Wilhelm Meister seems to be a bourgeois reply, but also Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, to use Hyppolite's phrase, and, though more distantly, Lenin's What Is to Be Done?, whose title takes up that of Chernyshevsky's famous work, whose reading and rereading is said to have played a major role in Lenin's radicalization.
29:04 Indeed, the Hegelian-Marxist conception of history has often been compared to the form of the Bildungsroman. My question is therefore the following. Besides the concept of becoming which lies at the very heart of the Bildungsroman form, as well as of the revolutionary spirit, what could be the importance of the concept of telos, equally central to this literary form, in revolutionary activity and mentality? Lenin's dream, which you mentioned in your talk, is for me a flagrant example of this.
29:40 Could you elaborate? But I will only take up the last part, since I've already developed the rest—here I'll just take what follows, I'm continuing my answer to this question, that is, I'll refocus on the teleological problem raised—I'm mixing up first names now—it's Raphaël, this time.
30:10 There we are, there we are, thank you, sorry, raised by Raphaël, already last time, at the workshop, and last time I took up this point again, which still seems to me—I'm committing myself, to pick up what I said earlier to Bashy—I'm committing myself, striving to rehabilitate the concept of end, but not to just dredge up some old relic whose time has passed, granting there was a pre-scientific, roughly speaking ideological, pre-scientific, anthropomorphic period, whatever you want to call it—one need only think of Aristotle's physics or Aristotle's cosmology to get an emblematic ideal type of what I'm talking about, journalistically speaking.
30:53 No, I rehabilitate this notion of end by inverting it, that is to say that the end, par excellence, in ancient finalism, is an end that is an already-there realized within natural being. Religion, even after Antiquity, will carry this viewpoint forward by saying that it is God, and no longer nature, but still, who arranged things in certain ways and assigned to each thing its end.
31:23 whereas the teleology I would like to rehabilitate here is not different from that, and is exactly its inverse. It is indeed a matter of reaffirming an end, the one Marx alludes to when he says, I recall, that what immediately distinguishes the most skillful bee from the clumsiest architect is that the architect has the house in his head before having it realized in being-there, doesn't he?
31:57 So, in existence, it first unfolds as representation, as essence, before it enters—before it passes, thanks to the work of the mason, of collective masons let it be said in passing, all those in the building trade—before it passes into existence. That's this projection. Projection. He does well to speak of Lenin and the dream. Raphaël proves he has connected all this very well.
32:28 Sorry, I allow myself to make value judgments, though I have no standing to evaluate one person or another, but it pleases me to see the connection made so well, because I sometimes scatter myself in my talk. And despite that, Raphaël did not lose the thread. He saw clearly the link between Marx's text on the bee and the architect and Lenin's text where he says dreaming is necessary. It is important to project oneself beyond the immediate, without which—and here he is replying to a narrow conception of militancy held by his contemporaries in his own party, which he gently criticizes here—when he says, meaning, if there weren't this possibility of projecting oneself beyond the immediate, we would have none of art, science, and philosophy.
33:14 Of art, of science, and there is a third thing—well, there are magnificent achievements of humanity's culture. There you have it. So, except that this end is one that man assigns to himself. It is not imposed on him by an order of things, by an already-there—I keep coming back to this—by an already-there proposed either, materialist naturalist viewpoint, by nature, positivist or neo-positivist viewpoint today, or by God, by the supernatural.
33:52 But in both cases—I recall that I said on purpose that nothing is more dialectical than to spot what is common within an apparently irreducible opposition, to show the common points between two adversaries who claim to be confronting each other point by point. Now, what is common between saying it is nature that makes man, or saying it is God who makes man? It's that man is made from the outside. The dice are loaded before the game even begins.
34:23 ...to have its own autonomy. And so, the synthesis, that is, the one that breaks with what is common to the thesis and the antithesis, namely the already-there, is the one that says: it is not nature that makes man—thesis—it is not the supernatural that makes man—antithesis—it is man who makes man. In other words, in the social production of their existence, men enter into necessary relations, determined independently of their will, relations, etc. I won't quote this famous passage from Marx in full, but still, I mean, we learn from it that man's existence is not innate, it is produced in the social production of their existence.
Critique of finalism and the finality of the finite being 35:01 So there you have it, I wanted to strongly insist on this rehabilitation of finality, and above all on the fact that if one does not affirm the end, the anti-finalists run into insurmountable contradictions. For the notion of finalism was rightly discredited at the Renaissance—I'm thinking of Bacon—but above all in the passage from the Renaissance to the classical age, that is, Galilean-Cartesian mechanism, to move quickly through notions familiar to those who know a bit of the history of ideas, whether in science or philosophy here—namely, what was ruined was a finalism that would be immanent in plants and stones, in herbis et lapidibus, I'm translating word for word, and in the stars.
36:01 It is not out of affection for the Earth that the Moon revolves around it. We must stop saying, as in Aristotle's physics, that if bodies accelerate as they fall—which Aristotle had seen quite well, and which was known even before him, it had been observed empirically that bodies accelerate as they fall, but the explanation was rather fanciful, very finalist in the least defensible sense—that is, it's Aristotle's image, just as horses, when they smell the stable, when they head back home, speed up because they know they'll soon get oats or hay, likewise bodies, as they approach the bottom, which is the natural place of heavy bodies... none of that is scientific, of course, we well know there is no up and down, and that the same law governs the motion of smoke and that of a lead ball falling, doesn't it?
36:46 The same laws of dynamics. So, just as horses that smell home, the stable, speed up impatiently, likewise heavy bodies, the graves as they're called, accelerate as they fall when they sense the bottom drawing near, the bottom being their stable, so to speak, the natural place of heavy bodies. There you go. That finalism has been ruined. One cannot understand how one could have been caught up in it for so long, if one does not follow this refutation through to the end.
37:20 I don't mean to say it's false. And now here is the truth. It's Y equals F of X, and F equals M gamma. Minus one-half G T squared in the case of falling. No. Now we must show how one could be a prisoner of the error for so long. That's the whole work of someone like Bachelard, for instance, to show—there is this magnificent phrase in Bachelard's Le Rationalisme appliqué—that a great deal of psychology has to be brought into physics for a physics free of all active psychologism to be able to develop.
37:55 That is to say, it's of course more comfortable to be in illusion than in truth. Because illusion always corresponds to what suits me, to some interest. And so the illusion par excellence, the geocentric, anthropocentric illusion—putting myself, man, at the center of the universe, the pre-Copernican illusion—is more reassuring than thinking that we are somewhere lost, as Pascal, coming after the Galilean revolution, clearly saw.
38:27 Isn't that so? That phrase, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me—that anguish, typical of modern man, can only emerge where the illusion of a reassuring world has collapsed. You see, when I said psychology, I don't mean pop psychology. If we follow this reasoning through, we understand why for so long the center was privileged over the periphery, just as it was long believed that it was the center of the brain and the encephalon where the essential cognitive functions lay, whereas we now know it's on the cortex, on the surface of the brain.
39:05 Likewise, one last example: alchemists sought to turn mercury inside out. Well, of course—if it's quick, if it escapes when you try to catch it like that, isn't it because it's so brilliant? I'm speaking within the imaginary here, not science. I'm speaking like an alchemist, not like a chemist. It's that inside it there is a warmth, a hearth, embers, and people tried to turn it inside out. No surprise—try turning a ball of mercury inside out and you'll see. Not with your hands, that can be dangerous. There you go. You see, here there is an aim of the order of libido, not of episteme.
39:40 The same drive that pushes children to rummage through their parents' cupboard when the parents aren't there, as if it were inside, in the hidden, that one would find the truth of my desire. Well, there you are. Once we've done this analysis, very roughly, we suddenly understand that finality has not been abolished—it's been put back in its proper place. It is for the one who desires that there is a finality. Not for the pebble, which pursues nothing.
40:14 There is no finality there at all. There is a function, but only because a being inhabited by ends—the one who made this piano, I don't know—assigned it one in view of other ends, those of the pianist who wants to play on it. But the object itself pursues no end. In fact, there is finality only in a finite being, precisely. And here I turn the argument around: not only is teleology, the one I speak of and rehabilitate, not mystical, but on the contrary it is the only one worthy of finitude, and hence of a properly understood materialism.
40:50 For the pebble pursues no end. At the other extreme from the pebble, the perfect being—if it exists at all, I'll assume it does for the sake of the argument—God pursues no end. If God pursued an end, it would mean something was lacking in him. How could he be blessed if anything at all were lacking to him? For after all, if he is said to be all-powerful—that's what people say, not I, those who believe in it—if he is all-powerful and has existed for an eternity, that's an infinite amount of time during which he can do everything he wants. How could anything still be lacking to him?
41:21 So it is neither in the pebble nor in God that there can be the pursuit of an end, a projection, but only in the being that is... And I come back to what I was saying, since I want to bring together Raphaël's question—is that right?—with the last two questions from the workshop, and I'll finish there for tonight, but they are very important, questions someone asked me about death and mediation, since I'm getting to that. I'm saying that it is only man, the being who is mediation par excellence.
Reading the preface to the Phenomenology: understanding 41:55 That's how I ended the workshop within the walls of the ENS, saying: it's an understatement to say that man makes mediations, whether it be language or the tool, not to mention memory—it's an understatement to say he makes mediations. Man is mediation. He is passage. He is the passage between these two extremes, isn't he, between the inertia of the pebble and the omnipotence imputed to God. He is caught within that dynamic.
42:27 Why do I come back to this now? Because the last two questions both revolved around a decisive concept in all of Hegelian thought, namely negativity. Both questions said, 'I didn't quite understand.' It was especially the last one that said, 'I didn't quite understand the relation between negativity and mediation.' And the other, the previous question, said, 'I thought Hegel was the thinker of freedom'—quite rightly—'and even of liberation.'
43:01 That was the question asked. Bravo. Liberation is much closer to the act of carrying out a mediation than freedom, which is already somewhat given, already there. But then suddenly, according to Dominique Pagani, it would rather be death that is central in Hegel's thought, as though there were an incompatibility. And here I'm compelled to read from my notes—well, compelled—it drives me to read the first text that illustrates this problem.
43:36 Good grief, where did I put this volume. Ah, there it is. So, there we go. It's a well-known passage, but one I'm using here to illustrate this precise point about the relation between mediation, determination, and death. There we go. It's in the preface to the Phenomenology.
44:06 When Hegel speaks—I am in the process of rehabilitating teleology, and here he rehabilitates the faculty at work in the sciences that banish all teleology. I'm thinking of the understanding, which is at work par excellence in the natural sciences. We have known since Kant, haven't we, that it is not reason. Reason, on the contrary, often says foolish things when it ventures into the order of nature—I'm speaking as Kant would. The understanding, on the other hand—yes, then, Y equals 2X, what Plato calls dianoia, discursive thought.
44:37 There you go. The understanding was the great enemy among the three Kantian faculties, sensibility, understanding, and reason. I note in passing that the understanding occupies a middle position. So it is the faculty of mediation par excellence. I note that in German Romanticism, that soil in which Hegel's whole youth was steeped, the understanding is the enemy par excellence.
45:12 It may happen that a German Romantic speaks well of reason—and even then, reluctantly, more inclined toward sensibility—but certainly not of the understanding, which is truly the down-to-earth side, isn't it, where rationality is confused, in the sense of the ignoramus who conflates reason and understanding. In short, what is at work in laboratories and in the sciences is despised by those who consider themselves well above all that—those to whom Goethe, who is no physicist, allows himself to say, through Faust, allows himself to point out: if you despise science and reason, the highest gifts of humanity, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost.
45:49 That's their Faust, isn't it, and Hegel likes to recall it often. So, surprisingly, Hegel, in the preface to the Phenomenology, rehabilitates the understanding, so mistreated by his Romantic contemporaries and in particular by his friend Schelling, from whom he was in the process of separating. And he says this: the activity of dividing is the strength and the work of the understanding. The word is underlined, Verstand.
46:19 in German, I say this in contrast to reason, which is Vernunft. The activity of dividing is the strength, we'll get there, is the labor of the understanding, of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of absolute power. It's hard to find a more solemn passage than this, I don't know. It's more than a rehabilitation. The circle—now he's going to take the opposite image, that of division.
46:51 The circle that rests in itself, closed upon itself, and which, like substance—perhaps the word most opposed to understanding, substance—holds all these moments together in immediate relation, the opposite of mediation, the circle, which arouses no astonishment. But—the difference is, I'm adding this—that the accident as such, separated from its surroundings, you see, I'm taking this, showing this, all right, this thing here is called a bookmark, and I isolate—I isolate this side here at the top, the little edge there, the straight line, it isn't isolated within it, it's attached to everything else.
47:33 I, on the other hand, set it apart, I picture a segment, and you too easily represent it in your mind. It's the understanding that allows you—look closely—but that the accidental as such, separated from its surroundings, that which is bound and effectively real only in its connection to something else, should obtain a being-there of its own and a distinct freedom—I isolate, in my thought, the top of the bookmark, and only the top edge, isn't that so—should obtain a being-there of its own and a distinct freedom—that is the prodigious power of the negative, the energy of the thought of the pure I.
Abstracting: distinguishing without separating 48:15 I'll interrupt this text for now—I interrupt, we haven't yet said the essential, but we've said the clearest part: that there is indeed a relation between the understanding, the negative, the energy of thought. Why negative? Because I must negate the whole rest of the object in order to isolate just this. We are within abstraction in the positive sense—because there is also a bad abstraction, but this is the good one. That is to say, the act of making abstraction from, of isolating—what is it to abstract?
48:48 It is to isolate by thought—implicitly, that which, in reality, is not isolated at all. When I say this book is made of paper—so much for the matter—and it has a rectangular shape—so much for the form—I distinguish, I isolate the form on one side and the matter on the other. Except that nowhere does the form exist like that, without any matter. Except in Aristotle's Metaphysics, one can never picture a form that is not embodied somewhere in some matter.
49:24 Even a lump of clay in the potter's shop that hasn't yet begun to be given a shape—even this heap has a form, a chaotic form, but a form nonetheless. To exist is always a mixture of form and matter. So we cannot separate them, form and matter, but we can distinguish them. Aristotle taught us to make this distinction between distinguishing and separating. We must distinguish matter from form, since I can see this rectangular form also in the tablet, not only in the book—so it is entirely independent of the book's matter.
49:57 We must distinguish them, but we cannot separate them. I cannot have in my left hand the pure rectangle and in my right hand a shapeless mass of paper. So the fact of being able to isolate in thought — that's what abstracting is — isolate in thought the most important thing, which, implicitly, in reality cannot be isolated. In other words, to tear away — we'll get there in a moment, you'll see — to tear away from the eternal flux of the sensible world, from the bottom of the cave, from becoming and hence from death, the permanent death and rebirth of being, to suddenly tear out a stability, to make something float above this perpetual flux which made Heraclitus say we never bathe twice in the same river, to suddenly make something emerge that remains stable.
Death and beauty without force 50:48 So, I repeat, but that the accidental as such, separated from its surroundings, that which is connected, effectively real, only in its connection to something else, obtains a being-there of its own and a distinct freedom — that is the prodigious power of the negative, the energy of thought, of the pure I. He had begun speaking about the understanding, and we see the understanding at work here. And now I move on. Death, if we want to call this unreality that, is the most fearsome thing, and holding fast to what is dead is what requires the greatest strength.
51:24 Rehabilitation — this arises from the understanding, and from its side, deadly for a certain illusory vision I had either of the world, or worse still, of myself. And here, of course, we have the antithesis of the understanding that brings death. There is the idol of the whole romantic generation, beauty. Beauty without strength, says Hegel — romantic beauty, beauty without strength — hates the understanding because the understanding expects of it what it is not capable of accomplishing.
51:59 Nowhere did Hegel break — not with aesthetics, on the contrary, years later he was to produce his longest work, an Aesthetics, in which his prodigious interest in the sphere of art is affirmed. No. But he broke with aestheticism, with the pretension of making aesthetics the final stage of knowledge. Beauty without strength hates the understanding because the understanding expects of it what it is not capable of accomplishing. It is not this life — implicitly narcissistic — that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but the life that endures death and maintains itself within death itself that is the life of spirit.
52:40 Spirit only wins its truth by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. There. I wanted to recall this crucial text, which I have already read in other contexts, but here I am reading it for something precise — not for great existential tremors about death, but very precisely to set concepts in perspective that we were not used to putting on the same level. The understanding — this is how it began — the activity of dividing, of separating, of being able to isolate in thought a determination. In sugar, I isolate the white color.
53:14 I don't care about the taste of all that, about the fact that it dissolves in water, about the other properties — I isolate the color, for example, or conversely, only the taste. So, the understanding separates, and thus carries death. If I separate, I divide, I destroy what was one. We know well that there is only anatomy of a corpse. There is only division of the parts of the body for a corpse, for a dead being.
53:46 The understanding, death, mediation, negation — these concepts mutually imply one another. I wanted to recall this. Now, I have the impression I'm only announcing bad news. That's a bit, I think, what led our two young friends to ask their questions. I thought this was about freedom. And now there's death. Wait — we've seen here that if I may say the negativity of the negative, if I allow myself this pleonasm.
The positivity of the negative and awareness of finitude 54:18 Now we must see — we are in dialectics — the positivity of the negative. Let me finish reading this excerpt, the preface, up to this passage. Spirit is this power only by knowing how to look the negative in the face and not, one might say in psychoanalytic terms, by repressing it — to use a more familiar representation today — by negating it, as Hegel would say, by repressing it in Freudian terms. So spirit is this power only insofar as it knows how to look the negative in the face and to dwell alongside it.
54:55 This dwelling is the magical power that converts the negative into being — and there we have the positivity of the negative. We had the impression that the negative was the disappearance of being, yes, but for the benefit of a new being. Nature becomes history with man. From the moment man becomes conscious of his finitude — I'm resuming the whole of what I said in the last workshop — and when he notices that there is a nothingness in nature — I'm not speaking in the name of Marx or Hegel or Pascal, I'll take Pascal, I took him last time.
55:29 Recall a very famous passage, the one on the two infinities, where he says: what is man in the universe — a whole with respect to nothingness, a nothingness with respect to the whole, a middle between nothing and everything. So, from the moment man becomes conscious of his finitude — it was Pascal, whom I had quoted, who said the finite, whatever dimension it has, whatever magnitude it has, whether it's the Himalayas or an ant, the finite is annihilated before the infinite. From the moment man becomes conscious of his finitude, he becomes conscious of his nothingness.
56:00 But he doesn't stop there — this isn't bad news, because it accounts for more... We have to go back to the origin of humanity to understand that this is precisely what characterizes the emergence of man, his awareness. And from there, all human activity — I'm thinking here of Tätigkeit, to use Marx's term in the fourth Thesis on Feuerbach, where he says what Feuerbach had not seen and what we owe to German idealism, namely Tätigkeit, the activity of the subject.
56:33 But it is not activity in the idealist sense. Marx tears it away from that idealism by affirming praxis. I spoke about the tool last time, and I quoted this text from the first Philosophy of Spirit. You see it does hold together. With Hegel, for the first time in the history of thought, we see a philosopher put the tool, the productive force in the most materialist sense possible, as one of three powers — to use his period's vocabulary — three powers of spirit. Spirit would not have appeared, in actuality, had it not been potentially present, as one of its three roots: memory, language, the tool.
Praxis in the service of infinite desire 57:07 So why am I speaking about the tool again? To return to mediation — I am at the heart of the two questions I recalled. Because I was told that the relation between mediation and negation was not seen. From the moment man becomes conscious of his finitude, his being, his existence becomes passage. If praxis is assigned the sole end of providing for man's needs, in that sense, the tool would be the extension of the organ.
57:46 To eat, the animal uses its claws, its teeth, its eye to spot prey, then its tooth or claws to bring it down, and its digestive system to digest it, and so on. If praxis were that, if it were at the service of need, it would have been finished long ago. Long ago it would have reached the ceiling of man's natural needs, long since satisfied. Well before history even began, back in prehistory. Think of that formidable hunter that Neanderthal man was.
58:21 If human technology seems to set no limit for itself, seems not to be susceptible to assignable limits, from Neanderthal's club to today's particle accelerator, it is no doubt because praxis is at the service of infinity — the infinity of one who has become conscious of his finitude. There is the dialectic.
58:51 It is at the service of infinite desire. This matters, because we... Some speak of degrowth today, some speak as though there were an era when production should have stopped right there, at that stage — that was the ideal year, I don't know when they'd fix it. And after that, it's all surplus. But wait, what does that mean? From when is there a surplus? Well, I'm more radical than that.
59:21 I can say that the cave paintings are not necessary at the vital, biological level — they are superfluous. That would suit management fine if we reasoned like that, you understand. You'd have just enough, like an animal kept on a leash in a cage. You'd have enough to feed yourself and breathe, and that's it, you paint. Everything else is superfluous, after all. Man begins with the rest, with what is superfluous — superfluous, I mean, from a strictly natural point of view.
59:51 So he is indeed passage, permanent passage from his naturalness, which he will never escape — that's where one must be a materialist — to the supernaturalness which he never ceases, not to dream of, as in the religious domain, but to produce. For as far as I know, manufactured objects and tools do not hang from trees; they are the fruit of labor, of work. Everything happens as if man had something of the raccoon about him — but a spiritual raccoon, not a natural one.
1:00:22 Let me explain: for the raccoon, it's because — I'm no zoology specialist — it apparently cannot eat something unless it has first dipped it in water, that is, washed it, in a way. Man strives to consume only what he himself has produced. And that is how man eats things cooked. Something, the object of desire, must bear a human mark in order to become an object of desire. So that's why I recall here — this is the first part of my broad answer to this question about the triptych mediation, negation, death — rather, death first in the order — overcoming death, mediation through negation, the negation of my naturalness.
1:01:15 When we tell a child, in every culture, put your hand in front of your mouth when you yawn, don't show your insides when you eat, and so on — I mean, this is each time a way of recalling that an intersubjective life between subjects consists in not presenting oneself as pure animality only, and not showing oneself as pure animality only. I did not say showing oneself as an angel, for everyone knows that he who wants to play the angel plays the beast, and no one is more bestial than someone who wants absolutely to free himself from every natural determination.
1:01:48 Now, I return to mediation, which I am now digging into. Last time I gave three moments of mediation. What Hegel unfolds in the first Philosophy of Spirit: memory, by means of which I make present what is no longer present — we can see clearly that the object of memory is not something immediate. I tear from the temporal flux something. Yes, that's what has been maintained since earlier. I tear from becoming, from the perpetual flux, something that is stable.
1:02:20 Memory, language, the tool — there is something common each time. It is the production of a being that is no longer a natural being but a spiritual being, that is, a mediated being. What am I in the process of saying? I am recalling that the word, language, for example, proceeds by way of death. Now — look closely.
Reading the 1803 philosophy of spirit: the name 1:02:54 There. I take up again the Philosophy of Spirit — not the one I was alluding to, but the 1803 one. There's 1803, 1805. The one from which I will draw the striking text where Hegel speaks of the night of being that comes forth to meet each of us when we look a man in the eyes, when we look into the eyes of the being that has become conscious of its finitude. But that's not the point here — the point is the passage to language. First of all, language speaks only with this Self, only with the meaning of the thing.
1:03:27 It gives a name to the thing and expresses that name — this is underlined — as the being of the object. Thus it tears it away from the flow of the temporal. Look closely. What is it? We answer — this is underlined — the verb 'to be': it is a lion, a donkey, etc. This is. That is to say, as Hegel continues, this is absolutely not something with a yellow color and paws like the real lion, like the sensible lion, like the lion the animal sees. No, no. And so on — an autonomous being of its own — no, it's a name, a sound.
1:03:59 Hegel underlines a sound — S-O-U-N-D — of my voice, something quite other than what it was in intuition. In intuition, being is nothing but an unconnected rhapsody, as Kant says. It is thanks to language, with a name, that I isolate it. You see why I first read the text on the understanding. I isolate by name — I isolate the animal I see there, I isolate it, I say to it, it's a lion. Suddenly I make a genus of it. Just think — a dachshund, a basset, a Saint Bernard, they have nothing in common to the eye. And I say, it's a dog. That power is abstraction.
1:04:30 We answer, it's a lion, a donkey, etc. This is, that is to say, it is absolutely not something with a yellow color, paws, and so on. But it is a name, a sound of my voice, something quite other than what it is in intuition. And such is its true being: it is only its name. The thing itself is something else — other than the word, that is. For the name itself is at first only the most superficial spiritual being. Through the name, then, the object as being is born from the I. Such is the first creative faculty exercised by spirit.
1:05:03 Adam gave a name to every thing. This is in the Old Testament. God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures. Adam gave a name to every thing. This is the right of majesty and the first appropriation of the whole of nature, or the act of creating that nature out of spirit. Logos is reason; the essence of things is discourse. So, I reintroduce mediation here. To utter the word is to suppress everything sensible in the thing and to keep only what is its name.
1:05:41 To raise it to the category, to the genus. Through this mediation, we communicate invariants to one another. Because otherwise, one could say each person is locked in their own bubble — one could say, after all, that Proust sometimes says each person is quite alone. Not that one is quite alone, but each person is quite alone. Yes, but for inessential things. I cannot communicate to you, Philippe, what I see here in the pattern of my bedspread.
1:06:15 But even for myself, it isolates me from myself. Because if I do that, already I don't see it under the same angle. Let's leave that aside — it's the indifferent difference, as Hegel says. We don't care about that kind of diversity. Thanks to the name, I go to the essential. I can tell you: turn up the sound, turn down the light, and we know very well what we're talking about. We're on the same wavelength. So language is this first way of tearing a stability — 'lion' — from a flux of sensations which, without that, would scatter into an unconnected rhapsody.
The tool, the temple, and the mutual implication of concepts 1:06:48 I take up Kant's image again. But then, what about the tool? Because Hegel says this is how man's mastery over nature began. Marx would not agree, and he would be right. Marx would say, no, it is the tool that gives stability. Recall what we saw, moreover, with the young Hegel when he said that the tool is what persists. The worker dies in the labor process, the object disappears in the labor process; what remains is the middle term. It is the tool.
1:07:18 The child of the next generation will be able to perfect the tool of the preceding generation, and it is only with the tool that there is progress, that one passes, say, from chipped flint to polished stone, from polished stone to bronze, from bronze to iron, and so on, through the calvary of history, as Hegel says. So, is stability, essential to the human world for tearing the universe away from the permanent death that inhabits it...
1:07:56 There isn't a single cell in our body — there are billions of them — not a single one that remains identical to itself at every instant of time. Each one is modified at every instant, chemically, in every way. So this stability that man raises up, as I spoke of the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, 50 km east of Athens, set before the immensity where everything is lost, where every limit, every determination is lost — the air, the light, the sun, the sea, of course, in their reciprocal infinities — suddenly all this is contradicted by the perfect quadrangular right angle of the magnificent temple of Poseidon standing before it, as if turning one's back on infinity to affirm man's world on solid ground.
1:08:42 This is what makes Rimbaud's drunken boat say, in the great reversal at the middle of the poem, after having scoured every sea of the globe, every conceivable and unimaginable infinity: 'I long for Europe's ancient parapets.' But is it the word or the tool, this parapet, that firmly holds what, in given being, is in perpetual flux? For the tool too gives stability.
1:09:13 The tool that allows me to make not just the cave I happen to find, but the house I am going to live in, home sweet home, in order to pass from the maternal womb, the natural and paradisiacal uterus, the original paradise, to a spiritual paradise, that is, one that is produced and not merely found — the children of men are not born like Mowgli, are they?
1:09:46 Are they not found like Oedipus, discovered moaning with pierced feet among the bushes near Thebes, or like Moses barely escaping drowning in the waters of the Nile, or like Siegfried wailing, the baby Siegfried wailing a stone's throw from the dragon's cave in Germanic mythology — since founding heroes, for them to be founders, must not themselves be founded, must be an absolute beginning, and so their origins and parents must be unknown: they are foundlings.
1:10:18 Human children, though, are born within four walls, and within those four walls, in a bed, in a pram, in a cradle, in a nest all the same — yes, where the mother sets it down once she has stopped nursing it, she sets it down. So, I wanted to recall all this to show the complicity that exists among concepts that must not be complicated — they are not juxtaposed, otherwise we would lose our way.
1:10:48 I'm the first to agree with that, but it becomes simpler once we bring them into phase, that is, once we see that they are equivalent, a bit like similar triangles, which always keep the same proportion — mediation, language, the tool, negation, death — all of this mutually implies one another. We have seen the founding role, not of death, but of the awareness of finitude, which is not at all the same thing, and which requires — to sum everything up — the passage to another ontology than natural ontology, the passage from zoology to anthropology, and hence to language, to the tool, and so on.
1:11:32 That is how I wanted to bring together my answer to the last three questions. Thank you very much. I will also, as has now become customary, thank everyone who has followed your remarks, who left comments, who shared this livestream. Yes, I always forget that we're online, a bit carried away in my readings. Pardon? Yes, I always forget indeed that we're online, good of you to remind me, carried away by my readings.
1:12:03 Yes, I'll pass on all the comments to you. There, let me add — should I say a word about the little issue we're having finding the room for December's workshop? Yes, as you like, you can take care of it, otherwise I can sum it up. Go ahead, go ahead. Well, I should tell those who, like us, are eager to get back to our usual habits at the Centre Culturel Goscinny, that we are waiting for a proposal, since they are still in the process of renovating and we've been told we won't hear anything before December.
1:12:41 Well, here we are, so it shouldn't be too much longer. If it does drag on, and I wouldn't want there to be too much of a gap between our workshops, we won't hesitate to propose, as we did within the walls of the École Normale Supérieure, but we'll find another venue. We won't hesitate to propose a venue, and if worse comes to worst and we can't find one and time is pressing — because I want us to keep more or less regular intervals for our talks — at the very least, we would do as we're doing now, online, quite simply, I mean live, via Facebook and Skype.
1:13:27 So, we won't fail in any case to give you news as soon as we've determined which venue is willing to host us. Let me take this opportunity to say — if by chance, though it would surprise me in the Île-de-France area where that's quite a luxury — if you have a venue to offer us, we'll take it. There you go. Thank you, Philippe, for reminding me of this point, which is not a minor point. OK, well, see you very very soon, Dominique, and as usual, I encourage everyone to send their comments and questions to the address — I've noted it again in the comments, otherwise it's easy to find by going to the site dominiquepagani.net. There you go, thank you.
1:14:15 Thank you very much, Philippe, for the reminder, and thanks to our listeners, to our faithful online audience. There you go. See you next time.
