English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Why say "sciences of history" rather than human sciences 3:59 In the past of our broadcasts, that covers roughly the last seven years of our regular publications, and it's hard not to notice that all the subjects hold together. I mean by that that the subject on memory, I'm continuing it by dealing with our new theme, which I've tried to gather into this question that may seem a bit odd formulated this way: how can sciences of history be real?
4:40 I'll clarify in my little introductory text. I may read it for those discovering it, at the risk of commenting on some parts. But since it announces this anyway, I haven't yet decided whether it will occupy us for a term or a semester. I have the feeling it will rather be a semester's worth, given the importance, richness, and extent of the material involved.
5:15 If it's a matter of making a permanent back-and-forth between the hard sciences and the humanities, that's still a lot of work for everyone. So I say this. The cycle of philosophical research opening at the start of this year 2021 with this question, and I repeat this question, how can the sciences of history be real? And I say, in parentheses, first thing: the sciences of history designating here, generically, the whole set of the human sciences.
5:47 Let that be clear. I could have said how can the human sciences be real. But well, since there's a polemic, isn't there, in the specialized institutes, from the Sorbonne to the EHESS, passing through the École Normale, about whether one should say human sciences or social sciences, it's the kind of polemic that generates a lot of chatter. And in my opinion, it's never wasted time, it exercises the philosophical and conceptual mind.
6:20 But still, I'm not sure we've already gotten around the essential stake when we dwell on this kind of problem. It's more a matter of counting yourselves, isn't it? Those who speak of social sciences are delighted to give themselves a vaguely pink coloring. Those who speak of human sciences prefer to drape themselves in a kind of inaxiology, I've never known the barbarism, I don't know, of axiological neutrality.
6:51 As they say in the same circles, there you go. Anyway. So we should have gotten past all that by now, given how long we've been talking together. So, I say the sciences of history. On the one hand, it's a decision I stand by. I mean, it's a commitment, that's what I mean. It's a position taken. It's not out of caution that I say the sciences of history. It's because I remain convinced that none of the human sciences and/or social sciences found in this or that university or faculty here or there has any meaning outside of history.
7:36 I understand history here in an extensive sense, meaning I go beyond writing. So I could also have said anthropology. You see, as if... But that means science of man. So we're in verbal magic. Except there, we speak Greek, it sounds more serious. I don't know, I could have said how can anthropology be real, how can a science of anthropology... But there again, that means science twice over, since -logy is the science of anthropos. You see, I seem to be joking, but we're going to talk a lot about these difficulties that result from our ways of speaking, which are quite different.
8:13 And depending on whether one lines up equations or unfolds speech, that will be an opposition that will be one of our fundamental reference points so as not to get lost throughout this new cycle. So, I go back a bit to the title, so I interrupt my reading. How can sciences of history be real?
Possible, real, necessary: the allusion to Kant 8:45 Well, the initiated, in fact all those who've done some philosophical studies with a minimum of seriousness, know that here I'm alluding to Kant. Because the question Kant asks throughout his most theoretical work, most devoted to knowledge and not to morality or art, to values. In short, his work dealing with the true and the false, and not the good and the bad, that's for morality, or the beautiful and the ugly, that's for aesthetics.
9:17 Well, let's go quickly. So, in his biggest volume, the famous Critique of Pure Reason, which plays a considerable role in the history of thought up to today, of course, and especially in theoretical thought, he suspends, doesn't he, practically the whole theoretical question, all attempts to answer the question what can I know, with a question that I summarize this way, so as not to be too technical: how are sciences of nature possible?
10:01 So you see, I'm playing a little game with this quote from Kant. How is Newton possible? At Kant's time, that was Kant's great theoretical problem. Not real, as I say, how can sciences of history be real? But he says possible, because the reality of scientific physics was already an established fact in Kant's time. It started with Galileo, and by his time it culminates with Newton, before being further enriched, not refuted—we'll come back to that—in the 20th century, with the theory of relativity, Einstein, and a bit later, quantum theory, that was Planck, Heisenberg, etc.
10:52 So Kant didn't have to ask himself the problem of how the sciences of nature can be real. They were real in his time. And he asks, very intelligently as a philosopher, he doesn't content himself with saying, well, it works, Newton. There's a reality of the appropriation of the laws of nature by the human brain. No, he asks himself, how is this possible? One might say, who cares after all, if it's real, that's already not bad.
11:22 No, but the whole philosophical interest of the matter is precisely to pass from the real to the possible. Alright, I'll stop juggling—those who've done some studies in the history of logic or epistemology know very well that I'm juggling here with what's called in logic the postulates of modality. To put it very simply, about a fairly complex problem, since it's simply a matter of knowing how, with what degree of certainty, one can anticipate the future.
11:56 Isn't that so? Modality is the passage of logic that studies statements relating to the future. Will Macron be re-elected president? There, that's a question relating to the future, isn't it? So one can immediately note that it's possible, that it's not yet real—we'll have to wait for election day to know if it's real. If we move from the possible to the real, you're starting to understand these distinctions.
12:29 I don't know. And the third term, which I haven't yet named, is necessary. There's the progression in the sciences of the future, in discourses about the future. The minimum one can state about the future—the minimum doesn't give much as knowledge, but without this minimum, it's not even worth trying to speak of scientificity, isn't it—is that the thing be possible. That the thing being spoken of in the future simply be possible.
13:03 That is, and here I go back to logic, a statement is possible, relates to a possible reality, when it contains no contradiction. Thus, there's a relation in the arithmetic sense, that is a fraction, if you like, a logos, as they said among the Greeks—not in the plural, logoi, yes, fractions are called logos. Hence algorithm, you see, by the way, or logarithm, which comes from the same root.
13:38 So a fraction represents an impossible number if its denominator is zero. So, if calculations trying to predict—I'm saying anything—an eclipse, or the arrival date of a satellite at the place one wants to send it, I mean, if the equations lead to terms where there's a zero denominator, then something went wrong somewhere. And besides, we're no longer in the real.
14:11 There you go, so it has to at least be possible. But you see, that doesn't inform us, it hasn't increased our certainty. What interests us is knowing whether he'll be elected or not. I'm telling you, it's not impossible, because there's no contradiction between the notion of Macron and the notion of being elected. There, no contradiction. With contradictions—no contradiction, if you prefer.
Galileo, mathematical necessity, and Descartes's prudence 14:42 Once experience, here and now, confirms it for us, we've passed from the possible to the real. We've made great progress in knowledge, and no longer only in discourse, in our heads. And then, there, knowledge reaches its maximum when my statement can be considered necessary. You see, Galileo—and you'll see this illustrated in the admirable Galilean studies of Alexandre Koyré, one of the great moments of the French epistemological school—Koyré rightly insists, with all the passages, where Galileo says 'I am not content with the experimental fact.'
15:29 It's indispensable, otherwise it's not serious. All the more so since he invented the Galilean telescope, after all. Not everything is equation with him, but he says, 'But as long as I don't have the mathematical reason for what's happening, I mean, I haven't finished my work'—I'm summarizing a bit simply. There. So that's what's deeply scientific and physical in Galileo. He wants to know why it's necessary that things be this way. In other words, it's not by chance that the Moon revolves around the Earth, it's not enough to just observe it.
16:01 We'll have to wait for Newton's universal gravitation to understand that it's not only possible and not only real, but that it's necessary given the distance separating them and the masses involved, to put it quickly. There. So, after this clarification, I go back to my title, how can historical sciences be real. I inverted Kant. There, we can't say that the human sciences exist like physics, like biology, with the same degree of rigor.
16:33 of certainty, agreement, unanimity and consensus. Well, consensus—the great moments of science are always ruptures in consensus. And Galileo, we can't say he began in the history of scientific thought with a consensus, but rather with a condemnation. Isn't that so? Descartes prudently decides to adopt as his motto 'I advance masked.' Never forget that the Discourse on Method appears in 1637, that is, just one year after Galileo's condemnation.
17:07 Descartes isn't entirely stupid. And he's watched at every moment. I'm alluding here, of course, to the ecclesiastical Inquisition. I'm not speaking of inquisition in the strict sense, but well, to what was held at that moment. And he goes so far as to say in the Discourse on Method, 'so that I offer this writing as a fable.' Everyone will find in it what they want, let's admit it's a fable. He's cautious, well.
17:38 And that, from him, was larvatus prodeo, isn't it? I advance masked. Watch out, he's a musketeer. So there, to come back to it, the human sciences don't have the degree of shared corpus that unites the scientific community as is the case in the hard sciences. And here, I'll illustrate with a phrase of Aristotle that I've happened to quote, but it's a good moment to recall it and not forget it during this cycle beginning, for it may sum up—it doesn't resolve our question, but it perfectly sums up the way of posing it.
18:24 Mathematics unites men, politics divides them. Because this question of the relation between scientific rigor and the attempt to establish its equivalent in philosophy is as old as the philosophical systems that have come down to us throughout the history of thought. But we'll have time to see that in detail. Today I'm unrolling a problematic, a program if you will, of the problems that will occupy us.
A cycle that is an arrival point: the image of the pass 18:56 So I resume, and this time I continue. The cycle of philosophical research opening at the start of this year 2021 with this question, how can sciences of history be real, may seem at first glance too vast, even too ambitious, to the point of casting doubt on the seriousness of the enterprise, correlated to our personal shortcomings. This isn't false modesty, I mean, I don't claim to master—I'm not an ecologist. An ecologist, now there's a science of everything, I admire them, it's fantastic.
19:26 They are at once glaciologists, climatologists, sociologists, moralists, I mean, it's extraordinary. Geologists, astronomers, astrophysicists, it's fantastic. Whereas a single sub-specialty of these disciplines demands a lifetime of effort and research, there are some who, poof, are specialists in everything—that is, there's not much to it, that's going to be serious.
19:56 Yes, environment, environment, there, here, there's the human, there's the historical, the artificial, the natural, the material, and no. We'd realize if there were specialists who did just one of the things in this little 10-square-meter room, that would already be something. In particular, the science of cats. Cats remain a mystery. Alright, let's be serious. So it seems ambitious, enormous, and I'd like to introduce the problem, since this would be the case, and I wouldn't have taken up this subject if it were a starting point.
20:34 We're at the foot of a mountain that seems so tall it's discouraging to climb, if you like, to keep the image we'll find again here. But I'd like to show, and I'll get to that, one shouldn't anticipate too much, that we mustn't forget it's also a point of arrival. I go back to what I said at the beginning, and this will be an occasion for review, this cycle. It's quite curious, this cycle, because we're a bit like the members of Christopher Columbus's crew, venturing onto a sea no one has charted, because the human sciences remain to be built in their rigorous scientificity.
21:13 Agreed? Seen that way, indeed, it's more than pretentious, it's almost megalomaniacal. But at the same time, to get there, this isn't the moment to forget what we've seen since we started talking together. Certain results have to be accumulated. And since some of you have kindly joined us along the way, as I was saying to Éluant earlier, this will be an occasion for review. So some will say, really, must we start again saying that the philosopher is halfway between the poet and the mathematician.
21:44 Yes, yes, yes. Because every time I speak, I have the feeling I won't have time. So I try to say the essential, get to the essential quickly. Now, we need to dig in and take our time. That's the value of review. It's not going back to zero and redoing the same path while watching carefully, like the Thompson twins in the desert, in Land of Black Gold, Tintin, isn't it, who try to follow the tracks of their own car without noticing they're going in circles.
22:15 in the desert. There. So that's what I'm going to develop now. Correlated to our personal shortcomings or to the modesty of the logistical means we entrust with these efforts of transmission. I'm speaking of material means. As for human means, I'm delighted with them. I will never be grateful enough to those who handle this logistics and thanks to whom we can communicate, you and I, isn't that so? This fear should even seem more than founded to the extent that it would fall into the illusion of believing that we're inviting here a new departure ex nihilo.
22:49 You see what I was saying a moment ago. This start of the year should also be perceived as a point of arrival. Not, certainly, the summit of the massif we've been striving to climb together since this year, but the pass—I'll keep the mountaineering metaphors, who knows why, maybe because with lockdown my legs are itching, isn't that so, the hiking is missing, there we are. But the pass, a mountain pass, is truly intermediate between the base and the summit, isn't it? The pass, from which the never-lost sight of that summit—one gets the impression I'm always making detours and that we're lost—the never-lost sight of that summit finally allows us to no longer believe it inaccessible in the essential of its stakes.
Know thyself: two pitfalls to avoid 23:33 Its stakes, let me recall now, are not—we're no longer in the hard sciences here—to elevate the knowledge of ourselves. That's what was inscribed at the entrance of the temple of Delphi and which Socrates and Plato made their motto: know thyself. That doesn't mean don't waste time knowing the movements of the electron. It doesn't mean that's useless, far from it.
24:03 One cannot repeat enough how much interest Plato placed, for example, in mathematics or astronomy, but also in acoustics, following Pythagoras, but that's not the proper object of philosophy. Philosophy is when the projector turns back on itself, which is symbolized in mathematics by the little loop and arrow that turns back on itself like this, and which illustrates the relation called reflexivity in set-theoretic language.
24:36 Isn't that so? For example, a equals a. So, the stake is this: to elevate the knowledge of ourselves, hence philosophy, to a level of logical rigor comparable to that of the so-called hard sciences—watch out, without falling into two traps, I'm adding this in voice-over, and here they are—without ever reducing itself, as too often throughout the philosophical journey, to a functional application of the latter—well, there, we've mathematized philosophy, and so we no longer need a philosophical specificity, it's basically a part of math.
25:25 I'll come back to that right away. And even less, then, the opposite trap, isn't it, into the derisory pretension of contravening the rigor of the so-called hard sciences, because there are philosophers who claim that the so-called hard sciences are wrong, but they don't know anything about it. I often cite the example of Bergson—not to say he knows nothing, Bergson is a very great thinker, and in certain progressive circles he's been too quickly dismissed under the pretext of being a reactionary philosopher, sidelined as old-fashioned, to put it in learned terms, but there are admirable things about time and duration and memory in particular—but he wasted a lot of time, and this is true, refuting sciences that were already quite outdated in his own time when he spoke of them, you see, it's that the philosopher exposes himself to the same ridicule in a way, especially seeing how advanced the hard sciences are today.
26:33 So, I repeat, elevate the knowledge of ourselves to a level of logical rigor comparable to that of the so-called hard sciences, there's the program, without ever reducing itself, as too often throughout the philosophical journey, either to a functional application of the latter, or, even less, to the derisory pretension of contravening it, and saying, philosophers say profound things that the sciences will never address. We're not going to feed on that bread.
27:03 We must indeed return to this dialogue, which isn't that of the philosopher and the scientist. So, from our very first—and here I'm starting to allude to the past of our conversations over seven years—from our very first talks, we have never stopped positioning the properly philosophical mode of expression—that's fine, not philosophy, the mode of expression I'm using right now, so it's language—the mode of expression means it's not music, it's not playing the pipe, or maybe figuratively, it's language, and moreover it's ordinary language.
The philosopher between the mathematician and the poet 27:45 It's not a language incomprehensible to the layman, starting with me, of highly specialized works of physics or mathematics or organic physics, whatever. So, chains of equations if you prefer, to put it more simply. So, we have never stopped positioning the properly philosophical mode of expression, which is thus the same as that of opinion, that of poetry too, that of language, under the double account—and speech, under the double contradictory—and I repeat the sentence, from our very first talks, we would say, is that we have never stopped positioning the philosopher, now, to go quickly, under the double, comma, contradictory and dialectical inspiration of the mathematician and the poet.
28:38 cannot appear more opposed. So, you see, the task of the philosopher is a bit torn between these two extremes that he'd like to hold together in the same effort, right, the rigor of the mathematician and the revelations about oneself contained in poetry, in general — it's a term that can be generalized to aesthetics as a whole and not just to literature, that is, to painting and music too — but we've seen this, we'll come back to it, the way that when we find something beautiful, it's because we discover that we have desires within us that we don't know, and we will have made a little progress toward "know thyself."
29:24 There we are — we won't lack occasions in this cycle to come back to it. It's the great discovery of Kant's testament, the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, right, and in particular the passages where he speaks of reflective judgment. So, now that we've reached the strategic mountain pass of our race, let's seize together the unhoped-for opportunity, or the one granted by this landing function. When you reach a pass, you know, all those who've climbed — they're out of breath — when you reach a pass, it's a bit less steep during the climb.
29:58 So let's take advantage of the fact that the pass is a landing, right, to measure a bit the path traveled, to recognize from a step-back perspective — you know, when you're up in the mountains, I'm carrying on my metaphor, excuse me — you see far, to recognize from a step-back perspective the coherent resultant of the whole, because when you're inside it, when your nose is in the ridges, etc., you look lost, and it's when you take a step back that you realize that in the end, there was indeed a continuous path through all of it.
30:32 The coherent resultant of the whole, beyond many apparent changes of... I'm lost in my own text, apparent change of direction, of course. So, here's the program. As you can well imagine there will be many abstract passages, to offset... this time "offset" is the verb, not "make a landing." To offset this abstract program, I'm going to switch to exactly the opposite of the abstract.
The Ring of the Nibelung as the concrete thread of the cycle 31:05 The concrete here and now, that is, I'm going to try to illustrate the reality, not just the possibility, but that there is indeed a rigor comparable to that of mathematics — I do mean it, I take responsibility for saying it — at work in the expressions of the subject, just as the hard sciences bring out a rigor in their grasp of objects. We're revising some things — at the pressing request, among others, of Philippe, whom I thank, but also we did a little poll and many of you said you'd like it if, instead of giving us a few pieces of the Rhine by pointillist allusion, just to illustrate the subject you're dealing with, so that history seems thrilling and seems to have an obvious philosophical interest, well, to unfold the complete history of the Rhine — well, I'm going to use the example of Wagner's Rhine. I recall, and I apologize to those who read us
32:15 on Facebook — I thank Thomas for having published the announcement and the text I'm reading to you now — but I had put a note after the word "Rhine," and of course I sent everything except the note I had written for that purpose. The note said that "the Rhine" is a way of summarizing Wagner's magnum opus, undoubtedly one of the longest ever composed by an artist, which is gigantic, since it lasts four days, and whose exact title is The Ring of the Nibelung, a stage festival play, The Ring of the Nibelung, also called The Tetralogy — but Wagner's own title is more rigorous: it's not a tetralogy, that is, it's not four dramas, it's a trilogy preceded by a prologue. That's why it's called the tetralogy, because three plus one makes four.
33:11 Let me remind you of the whole sequence in chronological order, from the very beginning to the final cataclysm: the very beginning is The Rhinegold, then there's The Valkyrie, then Siegfried, then Twilight of the Gods. Apart from The Rhinegold, all of that lasts on average between four and five hours each time, still. There you go. I recall the passage here — it's a peculiarity of the Greeks, who performed the tetralogy this way, the Oresteia, the Atreides, and it was so long that there was actually one who came to sleep on the tiers in the theater and brought food.
33:55 There, just as an anecdote, I recall that sort of thing. So, we hope, in subscribing to the repeated request of our most faithful subscribers, to unfold the logic of the Ring of the Nibelung cycle — I do mean its logic — we thus hope to test the relevance, or perhaps the invalidity, who knows, of the logical conquests made since the beginnings of our shared Odyssey, so this will be an occasion for review on that front.
Plato and geometry: contemplating the intelligible 34:28 There, and let's not forget the punch line: it remains for me to express the wish that the new year, for each and every one of us, manage to be at least better, as I said at the outset, than all those that preceded it. So, I was telling you that this isn't something new, my project apparently — I mean that from the very first philosophical system ever written that has come down to us, I'm thinking of Plato, there is of course his very famous formula inscribed at the entrance of his school, that none may enter here who is not a geometer. I insist on telling you each time: careful, that doesn't mean we're going to do geometry with Plato, it means you have to have done geometry to have the right to enter.
35:19 right? So, you have to have practiced contemplating images on paper, on sand, when you discuss, why not, things that don't exist, that are productions of the human mind, like the circle — because in natural or artificial, natural or human reality, you can find round things, things that are round, of course, by throwing a pebble in the water, you see what I mean, but those aren't circles, it's not a thing, it's a statement. To know about them, you consult mathematics textbooks, because I can give you a definition, but a somewhat outdated bit of mathematics now, Euclidean geometry — the circle, the locus of points equidistant from a single point called the center, in a single plane. There, we've already said that all the radii of a circle are equal, when we say that with "equidistant" — there, but it's a statement, the circle.
36:29 it's a logos, it's a discourse — that's Plato, you see. So Plato attaches great importance to mathematics because it's an exercise for contemplating what he calls the intelligible, the noeton, that is, what can be conceived without ever being seen, and even less touched. Go touch a mathematical circle — well, it doesn't even have thickness, how could you touch that, even an atom — and there are 10 billion atoms in the thousandth part of a mosquito's leg — even an atom, I mean, has a certain thickness, even its electron. A circle isn't like that, nor is a straight line. And likewise equality, which also plays such an important role in mathematics — Leibniz, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, while walking his listeners through a park, said: find me, in the whole park, two equal leaves, two identical leaves. You can say all you like—
37:41 it looks like it as one egg looks like another — when you look closely, an egg is never quite identical to another egg, and even supposing there were two eggs like that, which I put side by side, having exactly the same length, the same diameter, the same color, the same weight, it would still be different — logicians, no doubt, those who insist on it, because one is on the left, the other on the right, they're not in the same place. The identical is the identical. There, that's to show you that Plato attached great importance to this discipline that trains us to see things that don't exist — but he wants to apply this faculty of conceiving, and not merely seeing, to the knowledge of oneself. So, I was telling you, don't think we've jumped from one subject to another, that we've thrown anamnesis, amnesia, memory, etc. in the trash. I'll give you an example that it's not the case — we spoke of Oedipus, you remember, at the end of our lesson on memory, and we even read a few passages
Oedipus and the ontological contradiction of the subject 38:51 from Oedipus at Colonus, which is a bit less, a bit less read, a bit less known than Oedipus Rex, right, that terrible tragedy — Oedipus at Colonus has a more soothing ending, right, than the horror of the conclusion of Oedipus Rex, such horror that he tears out his own eyes, poor Oedipus, right, King Oedipus has one eye too many perhaps, as Hölderlin says in a very beautiful poem. So why am I talking about Oedipus? Because we understood through his example that, well, he has no interest in pursuing the anamnesis to the end — we understand why — although he is the one leading the investigation, the detective in search of knowledge as to who is the murderer who killed Laius, the king of Thebes — of the king of Thebes — he doesn't know that it's himself. So he leads the investigation with an almost exaggerated zeal, right, not content just to make sacrifices, etc., and to tell everyone to be a bit more virtuous,
40:02 to carouse less, to be, you know, a bit more restrained today — no, no, no, he goes further, saying that all those who don't give all the information they can to advance this investigation will be punished by law — in short, he goes overboard, but at the same time he always expects the murderer to be outside himself. So his anamnesis can never happen. Let me remind you — this is an occasion to recall the difference between self-knowledge and knowledge of the satellites of Saturn, which I was talking about earlier, or the magnitude of a star, or the movements of an electron around its nucleus, the atomic nucleus, sorry — the difference is that there is an existing contradiction, not a logical contradiction, an ontological contradiction, meaning that the subject is opposed to himself. The moon is not opposed to itself — that's inertia, the world of nature.
41:12 the world of natural matter, that's inertia. Human matter involves oppositions. Oedipus gives the impression of doing everything to carry out an anamnesis, to find the criminal, but in fact, unconsciously, he takes great care not to go all the way — and we've seen other examples of this, and we'll see more, because this is somewhat our task this time, to look a bit more closely at the strange maneuvering of the subject. So you see that when we did another cycle, the logic of the subject, the same problem arose in a different form — in other words, don't say we're moving from one subject to another, I rather have the impression that I've been going on about the same subject for seven years, there you go, I'm a bit stubborn or monomaniacal, as you like. There's a small allusion to this monomania in a text I can't recommend to you enough, in this period when some are utterly discouraged politically, right, it's to read Plato's Gorgias,
The Gorgias: Callicles, Socrates's touchstone 42:22 in whatever translation you like, finding it in paperback in every format, even in the small classics collections — Plato's Gorgias, which is undoubtedly the most political in dramatic intensity, I mean among these dialogues — it's not as exhaustive as the Republic, as the Laws, but it has such dramatic intensity, especially in the powerful moment when he argues with that little Nazi-in-the-making Callicles. And let me remind you here, for those who don't know, that all the characters in this dialogue, as is usually the case with Plato, actually existed, they're quite real — Gorgias is one of the most famous sophists of the time, his disciples Polus, etc., who appear in the dialogue, existed. The only character entirely invented by Plato is Callicles, that is, the one who opposes Socrates most violently — in other words, the others didn't go far enough in contradicting Socrates. A very fine example of dialectics, to the point that when Callicles finished his four-page tirade against Socrates, with a violence
43:32 like a kind of violence found in a young wolf in the city, a young lord as it were, since Callicles ends up saying: if you weren't so old, Socrates, you'd deserve a flogging, a beating — at that point there's no more dialogue. Well, when he's finished, not only does Socrates not tremble, but he replies: finally I have the interlocutor I needed. Callicles, you are for me like those touchstones used to test whether the gold I've been sold is genuine and not copper, because if I'm right with you, I'll be right against everyone. You see, well, he's the character they invented — because the others were afraid to tell the truth, they gave in to what some translators call, in Socrates's mouth, human respect — they didn't dare go all the way with their thinking. So, we'll call ourselves liberal today — that's nice, there's the word "liberty" in it, that's nice — without admitting that it's the fig leaf hiding the obscenity of capital
44:42 and the extortion, under the worst conditions, of surplus value across the planet. There you go — I recall that the greatest example of exploitation of all time is still 7-year-old children, deformed, working close to 10 hours a day in factories and near blast furnaces. As we'll talk quite a bit about science, in particular about someone with an ill-gotten prestige in philosophy of science — I'm thinking of Karl Popper — it's ill-gotten because he's so obsessed, so blinded by his anti-Marxism and his role in the Cold War, which isn't quite the distance a philosopher owes even to non-Marxists he deeply respects, like — I don't know — Carnap and Wittgenstein, say. So this Popper, who decided there are two kinds of societies, closed societies, open societies — of course the United States, the Western world, those are open societies — 3 million dead in Vietnam, 3 million dead in Korea, a trifle.
45:52 the carnage that continues with all those we're arming in the Sahel, or in Syria, in Iraq, and whom we armed in Libya — and it's not over — and I'm only talking about crimes of blood here, I'm not even talking about social criminality, right, which hides behind the health emergency, which does exist by the way and is very poorly managed, as we can see with the delay in vaccination. But let's stop there. It's been ages since philosophers alone began a dialogue with science — I gave the illustrious example of course of Plato, Aristotle rather being the one in confrontation with the sciences, what we'd call the sciences that existed then — for him it's biology, he's rather wary of the abstraction of mathematics when he says "the mathematicians, the dialecticians" — we know he means the Platonists, that's well known, it's even popular.
From Aristotle to Spinoza: philosophy engulfed by mathematics 47:02 but I prefer to say it for those who aren't aware — the famous painting by Raphael depicting Plato's academy, Plato talking with his disciples on the steps of a staircase, standing, sitting, opening a book, etc. Of course the two central figures are Plato and his student, who stayed with him for 30 years, Aristotle, descending the steps and seen there at the center of the painting — except Plato has his index finger pointing to the sky, Aristotle has his hand pointing to the earth, you see. That shows well the mathematical idealities proper — as a 20th-century title by my compatriot Jean-Toussaint Desanti put it, philosophy of the sciences — and the more pragmatic, more empirical side of Aristotle, staying down to earth and studying, let's say, the movement of the dogfish shark — no, he did do interesting studies on animals, even if his work
48:13 is teeming with scientific errors, nonetheless there's a fabulous effort of intelligibility for the time. And I'll close this little parenthesis — it must be said he was Alexander's tutor, the greatest thinker of his time collaborating with the greatest conqueror of his time, one of the greatest of all time. What a collaboration — well, he'd very, very, very respectfully give Alexander missions, saying: if your men could bring me back some samples, since you're going over there toward India, Afghanistan — well, it's not Afghanistan, it's Bactria — bring me back words, plants that we don't know here. So, I'll continue quickly surveying the history of thought to show you that this confrontation between the philosophical and the scientific has never stopped. How can one not think of Descartes, right — Descartes, who in the Discourse on Method gives this extraordinary summary, an autobiography of the years he devoted to his studies and which left him deeply frustrated, because he finds himself, as I quote,
49:23 his mind filled with more doubts than at the start of his research, right — but he accepts, I'll go quickly, he accepts the disciplines he studied: theology, literature, rhetoric — he accepts mathematics, and here, I quote him: "I was pleased above all with mathematics, because of the certainty and evidence of its reasoning." One could stop there — Descartes is indeed abstract, what interests him is certainty and evidence, there's a contemplative side there. But look at the misreading if you keep going with the sentence: "but I did not yet notice their true use, and thinking that they served only the mechanical arts, and, so to speak, to make men's work easier, I was astonished that, their foundation being so solid, nothing more had been built upon it." Good, Spinoza — it's proverbial to say that the Ethics, his most decisive work
50:34 and the most dazzling work in the history of written thought, proceeds, as they say, more geometrico, according to the laws of geometry, even with propositions directly borrowed from mathematicians — QED, at the end of a demonstration, right — and that's what I was referring to when philosophers, all too often, right, all too often, have simply let philosophy be swallowed up by a science, and of course by the most scientific of all, mathematics, forgetting the specificity of philosophy. And if in my first talks I keep coming back to it, I've insisted so much on the fact that — careful, I'm not going to defend Spinoza against Descartes, or Descartes against Spinoza, or Leibniz against both, or Kant against Leibniz, or Hegel against Kant, and Marx against Hegel — no, I'm not into fighting matches, the essence of what I'm saying is to show what they have in common
51:44 as philosophers, which isn't the same as all of them. Hegel has a very beautiful image when he says the different philosophical systems are like the stages of a plant — you can't skip a single one, from the seed to the bud, from the bud to the flower, from the flower to the fruit, there's a progression. It's a metaphor — like the little regard Hegel had for philosophy of nature, the image says exactly what it means. He says above all that these moments are not only mutually incompatible — you can't have, at the same time, in the same place, the flower and the fruit, the bud, the seed, it requires temporal stages, it requires time to separate them, there's a moment for each of these stages — but moreover, not only are they mutually incompatible, they are also equally necessary. In other words, Spinoza and Leibniz, Descartes, Christianity, paganism, are just as necessary in the evolution of the human spirit as one another.
52:54 it's a much more generous kind of thought, which doesn't just throw condemned ideas into the trash with decrees like Onfray's or Popper's. So you might say to me: but Heidegger is the most Nazi of philosophers, and yet you spend your time throwing him in the trash when you say that — no, the difference is that I recognize that Heidegger, whatever some may think, knows philosophy well, and that's what I forgive him for least — he's someone who knows what he's doing, in full knowledge of the facts. He's not my thick-necked brother-in-law — because there's also that far-right type in the Nazi electorate — but it's not that, it's more serious, he's the one who gives the green light to the intelligentsia. Let's get back to our subject, because it remains essential: these somewhat fantasized hopes that spared no words from any of the great philosophers, in the attempt to elevate philosophy to scientificity, but on one of the models
Kant's triangle: philosopher and geometer 54:04 of the hard sciences that already existed, was virtually definitively ruined by Kant — think about it, at bottom. Nonetheless there are those who continue, it's called logical neopositivism, very serious people, mind you — not a laughing matter, very rigorous people — who think we're going to arrive, I'll get back to it, at a mode of philosophical expression such that there will be no more ambiguity, no more polysemy, no ambivalence at all — in short, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that we will have said everything that can be said, and left in silence everything that must be kept silent because it cannot be said. There you go, we'll come back to all this today, I'm just summarizing the stakes, it's not the full program, but still, since we're on Kant, let me give you a small sample of what makes the problem present itself differently starting from Kant, and brings us closer to us, to the modern world, the world today — let's say the modern world, in the sense, as I often put it, of the one that gets set in place, and in which we still find ourselves, at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, with the two industrial revolutions
55:14 — in England — and political revolutions, in France, so, the combined effects of which we're still struggling with today. I'll give you an example, an excerpt if you like from the Critique of Pure Reason, precisely where Kant speaks of demonstration, and he starts by distinguishing between "I have shown" modestly and... I've shown that this is a demonstration — in mathematics you have to be modest, that's what we learn from Kant — if I have shown, there's showing and demonstrating; if I've shown, that's already not bad, but to demonstrate, you have to be tough. Let me simply read you this passage that's given to a philosopher — I'll skip the somewhat abstract theoretical passage so as not to tire you, since today is a programmatic day — but I'll give you the striking example he gives to make himself understood, of the difference
56:24 between the way the philosopher proceeds and the way the mathematician proceeds — not to say one is right, a purist, but they don't have the same aims at all, and you don't use a telescope to open a can of sardines, and you don't use a can opener to look at the stars. There, roughly speaking — that doesn't mean one is good and the other bad. Suppose that a philosopher is given the concept of a triangle — you have this superb example: suppose a philosopher is given the concept of a triangle — are you ready on the other side of the screen there?
57:00 I'm sending you the triangle — did you catch it? Suppose a philosopher is given the concept of a triangle — I say that because you'll need to turn it over in your hands, you'll see — and he's tasked with finding, in his own way, the way a philosopher would, what relation its angles can have to a right angle. You have the opportunity — you know the theorem, the sum of the angles of a triangle in plane space equals 180 degrees, or two right angles, as you like. How did we arrive at this result, Kant asks? Well, you give it to the philosopher, and he says: all you have is the concept of a triangle — from that, deduce for me, demonstrate to me that the sum of these angles must equal 180 degrees. And Kant says he doesn't manage it — so, I'll tell you, all he has is the concept of a figure enclosed between three lines — that he has, it's in the concept of a triangle by definition — and in that figure, the concept of an equal number of angles, that's what we mean by triangle. Moreover, he can reflect on this concept as much as he likes, he'll draw nothing new out of it — my given is a space enclosed between three sides that meet
58:10 in three angles — he'll draw nothing new out of it. He can analyze, clarify the concept of a straight line, or that of an angle, by analysis, the parts of the triangle, or that of the number three, but he cannot arrive at other properties that are not at all contained in these concepts. But let the geometer take up this question, and he begins at once by constructing a triangle — you'll say, what's this, wordplay? No, no, no — for now you had the triangle in your hands, I sent it to you, imagine you have a triangle made of rough wood, all right, you turn it over — no, no, the reasoner begins by representing it in intuition, that is, in vision, in such a way that the sides can be extended — you see, we're going to extend the sides, I'm telling you because I don't have a blackboard, but afterward it's a demonstration that a decent middle-school student manages to do, right, by using alternate interior angles, we manage to show that the three angles
59:20 of the triangle are found again on the straight line above, on the line parallel to the side below — roughly speaking, there's nothing left to do but see, it's practically a mere demonstration by showing. But let the geometers take up this question, they begin at once by constructing a triangle, knowing that two right angles together equal all the contiguous angles that can be drawn from a point taken on a straight line; he extends one side of his triangle and obtains two contiguous angles whose sum equals, by another already known theorem, that two opposite angles are equal — he begins at once by constructing a triangle, knowing that two right angles taken together equal all the contiguous angles that can be drawn from a point taken on a straight line; he extends one side of his triangle and obtains two contiguous angles whose sum equals two right angles; he then divides the external angle by drawing a line parallel to the opposite side of the triangle, and sees that this produces a contiguous angle equal to an interior angle, etc. It's child's play. In this way he arrives, through a chain of reasoning always guided
1:00:30 by intuition, by vision — that's for those who aren't sure — at a perfectly clear, even general solution to the question. What happened there? What does he have that the mathematician doesn't have just the concept of a triangle for? He has what Kant was the first to call the two a priori forms of sensibility, that is, before we even have senses, before we even open our eyes, there are a priori structures of vision, of hearing, whatever you like, called time and space. Try to hear a sound that occupies no duration at all, you tell me how that goes, you won't hear much. So there is the space outside the triangle that allows the sides to be extended — that's not given in the concept of the triangle that I threw at you — so there's this concept of infinite space around it, there are additional things, and that's the difference for Kant, which I'll now sum up for you in these terms, between mathematics and philosophy: philosophy proceeds by concept — the concept of triangle with what it implies, three angles, three sides, the space that encloses them,
Philosophical dogmatism and Descartes's hope 1:01:40 etc. — whereas the mathematician proceeds not by concept but by construction of concepts — to construct a concept is to come to see it, to represent it a priori in intuition, uniting the two worlds. There you go, a small example that shows to what extent the problem is posed differently starting from the end of the 18th century, right — for instance, wanting to apply mathematics to proofs of the existence of God or of the immortality of the soul, which the whole 17th century strove to do — that's the height of metaphysics, classical metaphysics at its peaks, called Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, Malebranche, there, that's the era. But once again, there's this illusion of wanting to apply a method that comes from mathematics, and which therefore presupposes the limits of space, to something which, by definition — I'm thinking of God — is in eternity, not in time.
1:02:50 for instance, that's contradictory. That ruined what can be called, since Kant, philosophical dogmatism — it's not at all the everyday sense, "the guy's a bit rigid, he has certainties," that's not it, it's not the one who says the criterion of beauty is the Parthenon because he's always lived in Athens, there's nothing more beautiful — no, no, that's not it — philosophical dogmatism, and the greatest philosophers didn't escape it — I'm thinking of Descartes and Spinoza, they're not exactly second-rate minds — and it's precisely from the fact that one claims a method or a principle that is supposed to resolve all problems without limit. And I won't leave this passage without illustrating it with a superb excerpt from the second... from the Discourse on Method, sorry, of Descartes, where he lays himself open to this Kantian critique even as he expresses it beautifully: those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy — I'm talking about mathematical demonstrations — those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy,
1:04:00 well, easy for him, Descartes, which geometers use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to imagine — watch out, me as philosopher now — that all the things — there's the dogmatism — that can fall within human knowledge, so the soul, the existence of God, that all things that can fall within human knowledge follow on from one another in the same way as these long chains of reasoning, and that provided only — I'll finish the sentence — and provided that one accepts as true only what is truly so among the propositions, and that one always keeps the required order — look at this extravagant hope, sorry, expectation of philosophical dogmatism — there can be none so far removed that we do not eventually reach it, nor so hidden that we do not uncover it. So, I insist
Philosophia: knowledge and wisdom, the initial limp 1:05:14 on something essential today: we are on a landing, that's the point, during which we're going to venture onto an unknown sea, and at the same time, so as not to be shipwrecked, not to hit a reef or anything, we have some acquired ground, we're not starting from zero, we're not at the foot of the mountain, we're at the pass, and there we have acquired knowledge, and among that acquired knowledge, I go back to our very beginnings, I'd like to encourage those who haven't done it — especially those who think "oh, I've already seen that 36 times" — careful, in light of what we're currently examining, it slightly changes the lighting of the first lessons, where I insisted on what is specific to philosophical inquiry, and I recall it here now because that's why I'm coming back to it, because it's what gets forgotten fastest — yes, again, no, we forget the anamnesis — so let's do this anamnesis. Philosophia — I can listen to what the word says rather than speak in its place, that's the right method, because it gives us
1:06:25 love of Sophia — you see, I'm being careful, I'm not translating right away, because those who know the translations know that translations sometimes say love of knowledge, sometimes love of wisdom, and we know — we learned this at the start, seven years ago — that these are precisely not the same thing, sometimes it's even exactly the opposite. There can be immense scientific knowledge in the head of a thoroughgoing scoundrel — the mad scientist, the sadistic scientist, that exists, they're known figures, right, in film, in fiction, and alas above all in history. You know, in the Third Reich there were people qualified in physics, chemistry, mathematics, some of whom voted for the Nazi party like a single man, there were even some — although a very large proportion, for reasons you can imagine, had to go elsewhere to avoid being liquidated on the spot — but when it comes to knowledge, it's a matter of relating
1:07:35 to what is — that's true and false, the problem of science, it's not good and evil, that's where the difference lies between knowledge and wisdom. You consult a scientist to know what's true or false, you consult a sage to know not what is, but what I ought to do — which is not at all the same thing. So I go back to the two fundamental questions: what can I know — that's for theoretical philosophy, you see, we're reviewing — it's theoretical in the sense that we haven't changed anything, not one atom of what's around us, there's no intervention in reality, for now it's not — it's about knowing what is. Whereas as soon as it's about values, about what I ought to do, etc., I'm in the practical order, that is, once I've decided, I'm going to have an effect on reality — I have to make a sandal, the cobbler's, because it was ordered of me, for example — we're not in morality yet, but even so, already there, I'm no longer leaving reality as it is to contemplate it the way an astronomer looks at the stars. So already, back to this division
1:08:46 to this initial limping of philosophy, because if one is in search of a Sophia that implies pursuing two targets that are not in the same place, that's not great for the legs — I say that because it's often been said that the philosopher limps from the very start, from Socrates, who didn't leave a single line — he's truly the very first — from Socrates on, it's even the scandal that led, that pushed Plato to write those dialogues in which he makes Socrates his Hercule Poirot, his Sherlock Holmes, if you like, or his Tintin, in the least reductive sense possible. Even with Socrates it begins with the philosopher being put to death by the city — it limps, a difficult relationship of the philosopher with his political present, that's not a mathematician's problem — a mathematician can die for his political ideas, but not because of his mathematical ideas, you see. Let me remind you—
1:09:58 Pythagoras died because of his religious convictions — he was being pursued, there was a war with the Syracusans, he was being pursued by Roman soldiers, and as he fled, he found his path blocked by a field of beans, and in Pythagoras's religion, the bean is taboo, it's bad, you must absolutely not eat it — he didn't dare cross it, and he got himself slaughtered on the spot. You see, it's not because of his equations. We have to go back to the beginning, we have to go back to knowing — the search for wisdom, I had given a very simple example, you'll see we're going to find all our divisions from the past seven years again, all our dichotomies — when you get lost, they're all connected. I had taken the example of these so-called scholars, in quotation marks — more astrologers than astronomers, though we do owe them the beginnings of astronomy, I'm thinking of those who climbed
The astronomer on the ziggurat and Socrates at its foot 1:11:08 on towers in Mesopotamia to observe the stars, and they had arrived at results that were quite spectacular for the time — well, who would climb up on what are called ziggurats, and the Tower of Babel happens there, Babel, Babylon happens in those places, with the idea, naive still for the time, that by climbing a few dozen meters I would see better what was happening among the stars, Sirius or Antares, better than from below. Well, and I had asked you to pay attention to two completely different positions: this astronomer, let's call him that, who asks the question, who poses to himself the question: what is the sun, alone on a tower — there's the subject, and indeed it's an object, an object of his research, which is the sun. So where I'm speaking — but again, some who are specialists in solar astronomy and who pose questions to something
1:12:18 I don't say to someone, because it will never answer: the sun is not the speaking animal, it doesn't let itself be put into equations, but it's the man who describes the equations of the sun — it doesn't answer, so this is a monologue, first of all. Second, the fundamental question is: what is it? Being is given — we'll find this all the way up to today in positivism: the thing exists, we don't ask whether it exists or not, we don't ask whether it is, but what it is. It's not a question of its existence, it's a question of its essence. You see, we have dichotomies revealing themselves, in other words, how it must be called — and here we are again in language, because it has to be called something: a star, a planet, a sphere, a cube — anyway, same for the Earth. And behold, at the foot of the tower, at the foot of the ziggurat, comes a little bearded man, the philosopher — that's the image of the Earth, Socrates, as we picture him, isn't it — who doesn't look at the sun but looks at the astronomer, and there
1:13:30 a dialogue can begin because he's addressing someone who speaks — it's not like the astronomer addressing the sun, but he doesn't ask the question "what is the sun" but "what do you call the sun?" When I'm told what you call the sun, we'll see perhaps if it's a planet — "what do you call..." And I noticed that many of our listeners, and I'm very glad of it, noted that it was very valuable for them to have understood what a scientific question is: "what do you call..." is a question of science, to answer "what do you call..." with equations, that's scientific. On the other hand, it's progress to answer with algorithms and not with the words of the tribe, to put it as, unfortunately, the philosopher does. So you see, we find this, from the very origin, this opposition between knowledge of objects — I come back to my astronomer facing the sun — you see that we don't change, all these different oppositions
1:14:40 come back to the same things, and the Delphic imperative, the Pythian imperative — because it was at the temple of Apollo, which had been built there, and a python had been found in the sacred spring, indeed the spring of Castalia — the Pythian imperative, "know thyself," here we understand better what that means, it's confirmed by the opposition between our two fellows: the one who questions the sun, who seeks to know objects, and knowledge — if we need it, and I'm the first to be glad that for millennia science has engaged on this path and made some progress, without which I probably wouldn't be alive, for example — I don't know what you think of it for yourselves — and it's a matter of knowing objects. And the discourse that seeks to know the subject seeks to know itself. We saw that for Oedipus this wasn't possible, so maybe it's a vain search, I don't know, that's what we'll see this year — it's interesting all the same — maybe there's such a force of repression in me that I'll never manage it, in the world
1:15:50 of psychoanalysis, there are quite a few who say that the real is — the notion of reality, understood in itself, is one of our main fantasies. I don't subscribe to that, far from it, but here we must understand why it comes in, because how can the subject inquire into certain truths that are fatal to him? So, those are the reminders I wanted to make. But before continuing, I'm still going to ask, Philippe, about the sacrosanct duration of my talk up to now, all right? Well, we've seen the question — since we still have a little time, since there are no questions to answer for the moment, I'll take the opportunity to read you another excerpt that relates more
Reading André Akoun: space dependent on conceptions of the world 1:17:04 to physical science than mathematical — you know, it's mathematics applied — an excerpt from an epistemologist named Akoun, A-K-O-U-N, André Akoun, who worked quite a bit on the corpus of the epistemologist I mentioned earlier, that is, Alexandre Koyré, the one who wrote the Galilean Studies but also — I stress this title, at a time when people keep saying that resources are limited, resources are finite, that we must stop, that we're headed for catastrophe — he wrote, this was back when I was still a student, not exactly the age of the barge and the... From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe — curious coincidence, if it is a coincidence — what characterizes the fantasized world of that time: physics was not yet a science because people thought the world was finite. So precisely, here, what we're going to move on to is what we'll see in this excerpt — I'm reading it: naive consciousness makes of space the objective
1:18:14 receptacle of life, but space is in reality dependent on the general conceptions within which it is inscribed. I'll give you an example: the notion of a border. For a long time it wasn't abstract; nowadays it's very abstract — there are guards watching that line, you take one more step, you're in Italy, you're no longer in France, or the reverse. This abstract notion of a border is recent — as it happens, it's after Descartes, after the scientific revolution, it dates from the late 17th century roughly, it starts being put in place in chancelleries. Before, people said "beyond the Pyrenees, one is in the kingdom of Spain." One can show that the notion of space changes. Obviously, space is in reality dependent on the general conceptions within which it is inscribed, and on the imaginary it invests, without anyone being aware of it, and this imaginary is the very one theorized by the various conceptions of the world — philosophy, science — it's an imposition. It goes without saying that everyone has a sense of space linked to their activity, which serves them as a framework — the farmer — I'm not reading this text to solve problems but to pose them — the farmer
1:19:24 is turned toward the nurturing earth that the sun warms and the rain waters, and toward the expanse of his fields under the skies — it's not an abstract space. The city dweller conceives a space traced out by the meandering of streets and rising in the verticality of skyscrapers. The train makes the earth a body across whose surface one glides, and the plane makes of this same earth a place within the infinity of spaces to be crossed. But behind these lived experiences that succeed and overlap one another according to the moment, one conception imposes itself on everyone at a precise time in history as their foundation and reference — today it is that of science. It's about his book too, of course — it also seems interesting to us to survey the theorizations of yesterday and today that permeate the imaginary and organize collective reality, and to discern their history. Such a questioning requires following in the footsteps of Alexandre Koyré, you see, the reference imposes itself, whose work presents itself as a genealogy of our universe, whose method will have the originality of linking the evolution of scientific thought to that of philosophical and religious ideas — they are often opposed, but in fact it's the dialogue between the two that produced the world we are in. Look rather, thought, he tells us, when it formulates itself
1:20:34 into a system, implies an image, or better, a conception of the world; it situates itself in relation to it. The mysticism of Böhme — Jacob Böhme is a great Rhenish, not German, mystic who had an enormous influence on philosophers like Schelling or Hegel — the mysticism, but which comes after the scientific revolution, just after, contemporary with, or after Pascal too, but here no longer the mathematician Pascal but the mystic Pascal, who said: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me," whose infinity had been revealed by the new physics — likewise, isn't it, that of Giordano Bruno, burned in a public square in Italy for having dared to say that the universe is infinite. Thought, he tells us, when it formulates itself into a system, implies an image, or better, a conception of the world, and situates itself in relation to it. The mysticism of Böhme is rigorously incomprehensible without reference to the new cosmology created by Copernicus; conversely, one does not truly understand the work of the astronomer or of the mathematician unless one sees it as penetrated by the thought of the philosopher and the theologian. I tried — look, when Einstein says God does not play dice
From the closed world to the infinite universe: a crisis of European consciousness 1:21:44 that illustrates well what he's in the process of saying. "I have tried," — it's Koyré speaking, being quoted here — "to analyze the scientific revolution of the 17th century, both source and result of a profound spiritual transformation which upset not only the content but the very frameworks of our thought" — as they say of us, how modern we are — thanks to this cracking, it's interesting to look more closely at the substitution of an infinite and homogeneous universe for the finite and hierarchically ordered cosmos of ancient thought. I say this for those who don't know it or never knew it, but it's important because I distrust certain teaching today — not the teachers, who do their job as best they can, the poor things, and deserve much credit — but the curricula, which are shrinking like a shagreen skin, I don't know what's imposed on them. I recall that in Ptolemy's conception, for example, or Aristotle's, I don't know, the universe surrounding us is made of domes fitting one inside another, each corresponding to a planet — there's the heaven of Mars
1:22:54 a real dome, the heaven of Venus, the heaven of Saturn, and so on — there were seven at the time because Neptune and Uranus hadn't been discovered yet, and so on. So the substitution of an infinite, homogeneous universe for the finite, hierarchically ordered cosmos of ancient and medieval thought implies and requires the recasting of the first principles of philosophical and scientific reason — this is taken from From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. If the fundamental ideas of science relate at the same time to the principle and to the current of philosophical thought, understanding the space of our astronomy — so, our space — will require not only that we seek to know the conceptions that preceded it and that it rejects, but also to see how the new space breaks with a whole ancient conception of the world — mind you, this is quite concrete — a whole way that man had of thinking his own place within being, and how another one imposes itself on him. You know, I've often told you that the modern man hates modernity, that the lover of baroque music hates romantic music precisely because he is a romantic, and that the very nature of modernity
1:24:04 is to hate itself, isn't it? Well, and now we're getting at the reasons, because I said it without grounding it earlier, now it's starting to make sense. What, in the modern conception of the universe, is offered to us is not simply a new discovery — it's the earth at the center, the sun at the center of the... no, that's not it, that's not simply it — in any case, what is offered to us in the modern conception of the universe is not simply a new discovery and a theoretical break within the space of science, it is a veritable crisis of European consciousness — there is a misfortune opened up by the scientific knowledge of modernity — this isn't a criticism of science, we're not going to reproach it for telling the truth, we're not saying it's hypnosis rather than truth — it is a veritable crisis of European consciousness which sees the geocentric world of the Middle Ages replaced by the decentered universe of modern astronomy, a sphere — quoting Pascal, of course — whose center is everywhere, circumference nowhere, something anguishing, a mutation tied to this upheaval in the grid of yesterday's signifiers, which sees man lose his place in the world at the same time as he loses this world, until then the assured framework
1:25:15 of his existence. Good grief, I thought the world I lived in was the center of the universe, and that I, as a man, was the center of this world, and now I'm being told that I'm drifting in an infinite cosmos, aren't I, and that on top of that I'd do well to look toward the ape to see my youth. That these ideas are today familiar takes nothing away from the fact that they constituted a great cultural revolution that definitively changed the idea man had of himself. Upheaval in ideas — the tremors are found again in these lines of John Donne, quoted by Koyré, lines by John Donne, English poet, from 1611, the age of Henri IV: 'The new philosophy calls all in doubt, / The element of fire is quite put out.' We'll hear that echoed again today, except it's the reverse — the world isn't warming, it's cooling — it's always the same kind of natural catastrophes. 'The element of fire is quite put out, the sun is lost, and the earth'
1:26:25 and no man's wit can well direct him where to look for it. All's in pieces, all coherence gone; all just supply, and all relation — the misfortune begins, subjective misfortune, and graver misfortunes, believe me, especially at that time. But this revolution was not — I'm speaking of states of mind — was not such, a sudden mutation all at once; revolutions too have a history — the scientific revolution didn't happen at midnight on December 31st, as I often say, revolutions too have a history, they need time to be accomplished. 'The bubble of the world swelled first before it burst' — before being infinite it had already swollen. When Copernicus says the sun is at the center, he still thinks the universe is finite, except we've changed centers, but since not everyone knew at the time that the sun is much farther away, that already widened it. So, 'the bubble of the world swelled first before it burst' — a fine expression, but it wasn't that long, he means
The bubble of the world swells: Cusa, Copernicus, Kepler 1:27:35 it went very fast, the chain of knowledge. Nicholas of Cusa is a link between the ancients and the moderns, died in 1464, end of the Renaissance, and De revolutionibus orbium coelestium — 'revolution' in the astronomical sense of the course of the celestial orbs — by Copernicus, published in 1653 [sic], barely a century after Nicholas of Cusa. He is inscribed within the belief-world of the Middle Ages, but he is the first to call into question the hierarchized structure of the universe. Let me recall here that throughout antiquity, and with Aristotle — because of Saint Thomas Aquinas's initiative to take up Aristotle in order to found Christian theology, with a few reservations, roughly — for Aristotle space is not homogeneous, there are two spaces in the cosmos — sorry, the laugh — it's a great thought, Aristotle, apart from what I'm saying here, this isn't his strongest point — there's a space below the moon that doesn't obey the same laws at all as the space beyond the moon. It makes people smile now — there's the sublunary world
1:28:46 the one below the moon, that's where everything goes a bit haywire, where nothing is really regular. Already his master Plato had said that this world had been created by a tipsy lawgiver — but Plato is wonderful, he always has something of the stage director about him — for him the world was created by a demiurge, a kind of genius, who has a potter's wheel — it's Plato speaking — he has a potter's wheel with which he's going to fashion everything we see around us. But he has a model — the model is what?
1:29:17 It's the Platonic world, the Ideas, the essences — well, here you mustn't even try to see them, because they can only be conceived, for instance he has the idea of the circle which he contemplates in the kosmos noetos, the intelligible world, all right? But since he's a bit drunk, his foot slips on the wheel, and instead of making a circle he makes an oval, you see? And that's the sublunary world in which we live, invaded by generation and corruption, where things don't last, where they wither, where they die, whereas the gods up there, the stars, are immortal. So as not to forget these beliefs of the time — Galileo had a lot of trouble simply saying there were mountains and roughness on the moon, because that meant saying the god was rugged — that wasn't possible, was it?
1:30:04 hollows and bumps, like that, among the gods! So he writes — well, Nicholas of Cusa sweeps all that away already before Copernicus, saying: one cannot say of the earth that Nicholas of Cusa — one cannot say of the earth that it is of a low nature, it is in its kind as perfect as the sun is in its own. This is already a revolution, the beginning of a revolution. One cannot oppose — it's still Nicholas speaking — a luminous sun to a dark earth; likewise he calls into question the earth's position as center of the sublunary world, because, he says, and this is already bold, there is no center. Copernicus, for his part, will expand the bubble of the world — he'll establish, you see, he'll establish that its diameter is at least 2000 times greater than the Middle Ages thought, and he estimates it at 20,000 earthly radii, or 200 million kilometers — that's remarkable, there was no telescope yet, no Galilean lens at the time — that's very strong, one could truly be a genius, both an observer and a calculator — but swelling the bubble is not the same as conceiving it as infinite, and if Copernicus shows that the Earth is in motion, the world remains conceived
1:31:15 by him as finite, surrounded by the sphere of fixed stars, whose center, the sun — he quotes Copernicus — 'resting on the royal throne' — see how far the scientific discourse strays — 'resting on the royal throne where governs the family of stars that surround it.' Kepler will remain within the same heliocentric conception — sun at the center — and the same idea of a finite universe. He writes, regarding the thesis of Giordano Bruno, the one who first dared to say the universe was infinite and maintained it so firmly, instead of having Galileo's very Italian prudence, that he was burned at the stake, isn't it — he writes regarding the thesis of Giordano Bruno, mystic of the idea of an infinite universe, who will die at the stake for it: 'This thought carries within it I know not what secret horror.' It cannot be true because it's horrible — you see, you see something repressed there, the subject opposes himself, the subject he wants to know, and Kepler is one of the greatest scientists of all time — Kepler took giant strides in our knowledge of planetary trajectories, but he has inner resistances that don't belong to the order of the hard sciences — the object of the hard sciences
1:32:25 is not to know why Kepler has such a horror of the Giordano-Bruno idea, isn't it, of a decentered universe — 'this thought carries within it I know not what secret horror; indeed one finds oneself wandering in that immensity to which all limits are denied, all center, and thereby all determinate place' — well, there you have the bourgeois civil society on the march, you already have what a 20th-century novelist — I'm thinking of Musil — will call the man without qualities, modern man, and a character — it's Dostoevsky, another contemporary novelist, practically, of the modern post-industrial world — a character will say: 'But then, if God does not exist, everything is permitted' — moral decentering, physical decentering, you see — that's not Dostoevsky's own idea at all, it's one of his characters — but very quickly the idea of the sphere of fixed stars will be given up, the stars will be distributed within a universe passing from the immense to the infinite. It's Descartes who will give the metaphysical edifice of the new conception of the world. So there, Descartes systematizes all these gains — know then, first,
Descartes and the laws of nature in homogeneous space 1:33:35 that by nature I do not here mean some goddesses or other kinds of imaginary powers, but — we're far from Mother Gaia, when we're endlessly told about it today in every publication — but I use this word to signify matter itself — interesting, because we'll come back to this confusion between nature and matter, an important point besides — I use it to signify matter itself, insofar as I consider it with all the qualities I have attributed to it, taken all together, and on condition that God continues to preserve it in the same way he created it. Descartes is the first to formulate the principle of inertia — not that he conceived it, that's Galileo — but that he formulates it as a rule. I remind you that this principle is stated roughly as follows: a body subject to no force — therefore undergoing no external change — a body subject to no force is either at rest or moving in a uniform straight line. So, and on condition
1:34:45 that God continues to preserve it in the same way he created it — for from this alone, that he continues thus to preserve it, it follows of necessity — not possibility, indeed reality, but necessity — that there must be several changes in its parts, which, it seems to me, cannot properly be attributed to the action of God, since they do not change, so I attribute them to nature. In other words, God created the world, and afterward — as Pascal said ironically, that God gave the flick of the finger that creates the world — the geometer and the astronomer can account for almost everything, and the rules according to which these changes occur, I call them laws of nature — the laws of nature as he defines them, which are thus nothing other than the rules governing — this is the end, I reassure you — homogeneous space, as conceived by geometers. It is not only the structural image of the universe that finds itself profoundly modified by mechanistic physics — there is no longer a sacred space, a profane space, homogeneous — it is not only the structural image of the universe that finds itself profoundly modified by mechanistic physics, but also
Science means knowledge: the same demand for rigor 1:35:55 the very idea of its becoming and of the constant changes occurring within it. Nature invents nothing; phenomena merely appear there that are explicable by such-and-such a simple law, and so on — I'll stop my incursion there, in this very rapid overview, and we'll dwell on certain more important moments in the history of the emergence of scientific thought. But what the upshot and the philosophical stake are, which I recall and which I maintain, and which must not be forgotten as we begin this new cycle, is that science — is it nature? Science of history, hard science — it is only nature that the hard sciences have found a field of systematic application in. Don't tell me — what about demography? Demography is not a science of man but a science of nature — there are natural reasons why there are roughly as many men as women. So the distinction runs through man — it's not a matter of decoupling man from nature, but of decoupling what is properly human from nature, and that is quite different
1:37:05 there isn't only the properly human in man — the fact that I digest, I share that with the amoeba. So what must not be forgotten, that's the essential stake, is that science of nature or human science or science of history or social science, whatever you want to call it, the invariant — you've just heard it — is the word science. It must still be recalled, one must listen to the word rather than speak in its place: scire, s-c-i-r-e, scire in Latin means to know, that's all. So someone who says 'I know that two and two make' — 'I know how much that is,' it makes five — in fact he doesn't know it, he doesn't have that knowledge. In other words, a piece of knowledge — there's no such thing as untrue knowledge — what's in our minds that we imagine to be knowledge, but which relates to something that will turn out, through such and such a scientific advance or such and such a demonstration, to be false, is not knowledge — it falls, it falls back into the field of doxa, of opinion — this is important
1:38:15 we have something in common with the sciences — the old companionship between the philosopher and the mathematician — we've also seen it with the poet, but with the mathematician it's this same demand for rigor, even if it's not at all the same rigor and doesn't relate to the same domain at all. It's not the domain of objects determined by laws, but of a somewhat unruly man, a subject who, as a subject, acts up and somehow opposes knowledge — he doesn't have the passivity of the object. That's my first reminder before concluding this opening, and the second, which is at least as important, is to recall that within this great division there is knowledge in both cases — knowledge of objects on the side of the hard sciences, and knowledge relating, in the case that concerns us, to a subject — there is indeed the same rigor
1:39:25 but this rigor must be caught red-handed if we're to try to prove, in my initial question, that it is real. It's not, as with Kant, a matter of saying: Newton, that's possible, that's real, there's nothing more to say, it's proven itself, eclipses are predicted, Mars and its moons, tick tick tick, a few small delays, a film about Mercury, we'll talk about that later — but there, there's an extraordinary predictability starting from something extremely simple, arriving through complicated calculations — the scientificity of physics is real from the 16th and 17th centuries on. Whereas for Kant one must ask how that was possible — we have the opposite problem, I'm speaking of the fact that they are real, I'm speaking of the fact that not only are they possible but they can be real. How can they be real? And for that I must show that it already exists, that it suffices to analyze
1:40:37 in the scientific sense, the way one analyzes water and finds hydrogen and oxygen, decomposed into elementary parts, to analyze the productions of a subject — not the radiation of the star Betelgeuse, but to grasp the logic at work in the productions of a subject, in order to be scientific, that is, not to speculate on what a subject ought to be, on what his thought ought to be, in short everything that would be invisible, but rather to catch it red-handed, as I do with texts. And I'll give one last example, and that's what will bring me to conclude, and you see that I spend my time anticipating a future of the cycle that's opening — but going back to the origin of our talks, it's that from my very first talks I quoted this line of Rimbaud, from The Drunken Boat: 'the exalted dawn like a flock of doves' — let me recall a very quick demonstration, though it doesn't affect the beauty of the line at all, but which shows to what extent
Rimbaud's exalted dawn: a rigor like an equation 1:41:47 it is rigorous like an equation. We say to ourselves, how — he might have said, black as ebony, there I understand — 'the exalted dawn like a flock of doves' — 'like' can be replaced, by substitution, with 'as,' 'in the image of,' 'in the same way as' — when we say 'like,' we're making an identification, a comparison. Now, I don't see what common ground there is between dawn and a flock of doves, and by analyzing it we realize that 'aube' [dawn] is a variant of alba, which means white — albino — wait, we haven't all studied Latin, all the same — and moreover we're not obliged to know that aube derives from alba precisely — I'm going to show — the poet is playing completely unconsciously with the linguistic unconscious. It's enough to be a French speaker, not even French — a French speaker from Congo, a French speaker from Vietnam, whoever — it's enough, it remains enough, to realize that there is
1:42:59 in the language a whole series of terms with this root — albâtre [alabaster], albinos, albumine — you can go about it however you like, I'm sure you'll find more than I will, depending on your respective specialties — and so 'aube' will be linked to white, and when Hugo, another poet, says 'at the hour when dawn whitens the countryside,' he is not doing astronomy, he is not describing what we actually see — the horizon isn't white at dawn, it's actually more pink, etc. — but it's because the word 'aube' pulls us toward whiteness — it's a different logic. There, I haven't quite finished with this line — already there's a common point between dawn and dove: the color white, between the two parts, left and right of 'as' — we're in the realm of rigor — and moreover it's not only that — 'like a flock of doves' — you see the flight of the doves, the flight is the line rising from below to above, and dawn is what?
1:44:03 it's when the sun rises — you might think he's interpreting there — no, no, no — 'the exalted dawn,' exalted, that's from altus, meaning going upward — I'm analyzing, I'm not interpreting. But what am I analyzing? Not a volcanic eruption, not a lunar eclipse, which would be a precious topic to study — no, I'm analyzing the expression of a subject, and I see laws, rigors, falling into place: that elevation is valued more than lowering. But I told you once, look, just within language — our own, but in every language it's the same — there's a distribution of values between low and high: dragging someone through the mire — the mire is what's beneath our feet — as opposed to holding the high ground, or telling someone 'what baseness of character,' 'what nobility of outlook' — there, there are distributions of values owing nothing to physics, and which care nothing at all about high and low — we've known this for a long time
1:45:13 now in science, isn't that so? There, I'll stop on this example to show you that there's plenty to work with if there is such rigor at work, and if the Rimbaldian line, the Rimbaldian utterance, has moved almost toward an equation, since now we have, to the left and right of 'as,' identical terms, as in the two sides of an equation — there is hope, comrade. So there we are, and I'll say to you: until next time, we need to make this journey together, there's a great deal that will be difficult to build
