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Alternating epistemology and the Ring from one session to the next 0:00 Good evening, dear friends. Very happy to be with you again. I hope that most of you have read the presentation that must have been circulated yesterday, I believe, the presentation of today's session. I'll recall, to sum it up in essence, that the cycle we began two sessions ago, this being the third, this cycle which has as its generic title, you see, the...
0:56 I'm forgetting my own formulations. The sciences... the sciences of history... to what extent can the sciences of history be real? I had given you a whole development during the first session, that it was a little wink at Kant, who had asked himself the question, not of the real, but of the possible. I won't go back over that.
1:27 And then, it's a bit of self-criticism, I mean, I thought I could within the same... during the same session, within our two weekly hours, satisfy the two audiences that split when we did our consultation, when we asked you whether, after our cycle on memory and amnesia, you preferred that we deal rather with...
1:57 which was my own proposal, the link between the hard sciences and the sciences of history, between nature and culture, taking as much time as needed. And then, others had been asking me for a while to present in a more systematic way the unfolding, this great drama that is Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, or more briefly the Ring, just the Ring on its own, isn't it?
2:35 Around every major German city you have a motorway called the Ring, which means the ring, as we'd say, the ring road, the Ring, isn't it? It's the same word as for a ring one wears on a finger, or doesn't. So, democratically, since I had trouble deciding, I asked you to choose, and it was roughly half and half, wasn't it? With a slight edge for those who wanted us to talk about epistemology, the science of nature and the human sciences, and hard sciences and philosophy if you prefer, and since that held together, and so there wouldn't be frustration, I thought, at first, that we could do both, and I still think so, but I went about it the wrong way by thinking that within a single session, I come back to it, I could start by structuring the epistemological problem at the beginning of the session, then afterwards illustrate,
3:45 reward these efforts of abstraction by finding again everything we had formalized there, in a very concrete example, Richard Wagner's Ring - well, an approach to the Ring without any broadcasting of musical or dramatic sequences would be rather pointless, it's not the kind of object one can talk about like that without giving extracts, sequences, musical and dramatic sequences being incompressible - a book, you can speed up or slow down the reading, but a musical sequence, I can't, like the old analog record players, isn't it, make it go to a high pitch because I switched from 33 to 45 rpm, so there you have it, there's an incompressible time for broadcasting the sequences, the excerpts from the Ring, and so, it's not a matter of state, but I thought that the wisest thing, and we're inaugurating this new formula today, was to alternate each week - one week, one Wednesday, I take up again our problem of the hard sciences and the sciences of history,
4:59 and the following Wednesday, we find these problems again, but embodied, isn't it, in passages from the Ring, and that's much more concrete, much more satisfying. So that's the novelty of the formula, and I'm starting to apply it this evening, coming back after two sessions devoted one after another to the Ring, because it was a big chunk to discover, so we had to do two sessions, now I come back, isn't it, to our scientific problem, and I come back to it - and here I have thanks to give, first apologies, isn't it, to those who ask questions, and Philippe is kind enough to pass them on to me at the end of the session, and so since I don't have enough time left for certain questions which are long, as is the case with the ones we're going to deal with today, which we're going to try to answer, and since they are long, relevant and rich in content, well, so I apologize to all those for whom I'm behind on questions, it's not at all that I consider them secondary,
6:10 their question is, on the contrary, that they are sometimes so heavy with content that I put off my answer for later, but I don't forget anyone. Here it's a matter of an excellent question from Bastien Castillo - I say excellent, sorry, I'm not here to give evaluations of physical persons, I have no qualification for that, in terms of level I mean, but on the other hand, I mean it's someone who at least gives me the subjective satisfaction of giving more than the impression that he has followed along, which I often permit myself to ask you not to forget to do, that is, not to keep moving forward in our sessions, as is always the image I use, like this landscape scrolling by in the car's rear-view mirror that will never come back.
7:07 But on the contrary, to see that as we move forward, if we remember, and if we keep past sequences in mind, if we look back at them from time to time, we notice that a coherence emerges - and here, I'll take the opportunity, after apologizing to Bastien for not having had time last time to answer his question, but we'll make up for it well today thanks to him, I'll also take the opportunity to apologize to - I quote his pseudonym - Clos Missile, whom I also didn't have time to answer, and who precisely doesn't see this coherence, and probably a new person, I don't know, as they say, their sex, their gender now, so I don't know if it's he or she, but who has the courage to say that she is completely lost, or that he is completely lost, and that, I find - I reassure her - is proof that she isn't quite lost, because that has something positive about it,
8:18 about being a bit lost, especially since I add to it sometimes with my detours, but with material like the Ring and problems as difficult as the passage from the natural sciences to the sciences of history, in Kantian terms, so as not to repeat myself, from theoretical philosophy to practical philosophy - we'll see everything that is pre-Marxian in this terminology, that's why it's not just for love of variety that I quote it here, precisely - I mean, to be sure of the term, that Kant himself said there was an unbridgeable abyss, the formula is famous, between, I don't know, physics, chemistry, biology, on the one hand, and history, morality, politics, sociology, in short everything that stems from the relations of men among themselves and not from the relation of man to his so-called natural, or in any case material, environment.
Gold, love and freedom according to a question from the audience 9:26 So, I'll allow myself to read Clomissile's question to show just how much courage it took to formulate it. Really very difficult, this cycle, you see, it's her speaking, really - or him, excuse me - really very difficult, this cycle, there would apparently be something to understand between gold and its accumulation, which proves that she has followed well, love and freedom - in parentheses, Freya - so she's not entirely lost, she remembered that Freya - we find 'free' in English, 'frei' in German, isn't it - that the goddess of beauty, in short, in a word, beauty has a proper name that means 'the free one.'
10:14 So, from the standpoint of the myth, there is a link between love - she says love and freedom, though to be rigorous one should say beauty and freedom - but still, she has understood very well, which proves that she really isn't lost - what I pointed out last time, that since Plato, since the first written system of philosophy in the strict sense that has come down to us, since Plato's Symposium, we know full well that one cannot speak of eros - I use an extensive term, not to speak Greek to show off, but let's say containing every form of love you like, from the most ethereal to the most hardcore, including the love of beautiful things in a museum - I note that since always, I take the example of Plato's Symposium, its title is 'On Love' - sorry, the Symposium, or On Love, and it's in that work that Plato gives us his most developed definition of beauty, that his approach is almost a presentation
11:25 as his idea was in the cosmos noetos, in the world of ideas, a presentation of the idea of the beautiful, in an absolutely stunning text, I really ought to read it to you sometime. So I continue: there would apparently be something to understand between gold and its accumulation, love and freedom, so love and thus beauty and freedom, you see how one must proceed. But then what? I already hadn't grasped anything with Mnemosyne, I'll come back to that, it's very good that they say so, but there with Wagner it's even worse, I'm completely lost, but Wagner has lost others too.
12:03 I'll interrupt my reading for a moment, but once, Nietzsche - at the time they were still buddies, as we'd say now, Nietzsche who stayed at the Wagners' whenever he had a free moment, he couldn't wait for it when he was a professor in Basel, so in Switzerland, and the Wagners - Wagner was living in unlawful wedlock since he was with another man's wife and a third man's money in a house lent by the latter on the shore of the most beautiful Swiss lake, Lake Lucerne, so less than an hour by train, Nietzsche went from Basel to Lucerne and he couldn't wait for the weekend at the Wagners', where everyone was waiting, the children too, who were waiting for Uncle Nietzsche, you see - Nietzsche once knocks on the door and Wagner comes to open it walking on his hands, you see, he was 30 years older than Nietzsche - one would think it's the young one with such demonic agility, but no, it's the old one - while young Nietzsche was overwhelmed by an obsessive myopia, migraines that gave him impossible insomnia, isn't it?
13:09 In short, and the other one, isn't it, active as a young Titan though nearing sixty. So, closing my parenthesis, I'm completely lost, all I can see is that Alberich, by renouncing love for gold, fine, correct, not only gets it stolen from him by Wotan - she writes 'Woltan,' I remind you it's Wotan, no L - but on top of that, loses his hand and ends up with nothing at all.
13:43 She understood very well the dirtiest trick that could be played on anyone in the whole Ring, it's really the trick played on Alberich - I say this because many people say Alberich is the negative character, the villain, but still, he is also the victim. Nobody had dared renounce something as indispensable to each and every one of us, isn't it, as love, and he renounced it in order to have the gold, because, after the taunting of the Rhinemaidens, he thought he had nothing left to lose in matters of love, he had renounced seduction; on the other hand, he can thus appropriate the gold, for that is the condition for appropriating the gold, I recall, for whoever - but the essential thing is, having renounced love, the gods come and steal the gold from him, so that he no longer has either love or gold, isn't it, but on top of that, loses his hand and ends up with nothing at all, whereas Wotan, who perjures himself, several times - he had promised Freya to the giant, he perjures himself, isn't it, afterwards, he who is the guardian of laws and rules who has ordained
14:53 that one cannot have both love and gold at once, he goes and steals the gold from the one who had acquired it by respecting that incompatibility - he who perjures himself and steals the gold only has to trade it to get Freya back and sail happily toward the castle. Indeed, I don't know if Clomissile went as far as the end of the viewing of The Rhinegold, which is the shortest, it's a prologue, the shortest of the four days, a bit over an hour, and at the end, so, the gods can finally, isn't it, inaugurate, let's say, move into their new dwelling, the palace, Walhall, hall, the Hall, the palace of the valiant, Walhall, because originally, these are warriors, all these gods are throat-slitters, that's still to come, the poem of the Nibelungen, but the Middle Ages ends in an evolving carnage, notably, so, at the end, they have nothing left to do but go back
16:03 into their palace, to inaugurate it, and, I finish Clomissile's quotation, he only has to trade it to get Freya back and sail happily toward the castle. Clomissile's conclusion: the moral isn't very moral for once. So, there, I answer her before - before, I had said we wouldn't deal with The Rhinegold today, it's only to catch up on my delay in answering Clomissile here that I'm taking care of it - and you'll see that there are more and more links between the epistemological part of our reflection and the recourse to myth. Already, I've made a small correction: yes, there is a link between love and freedom, but this link is more explicit when we recall that love here implies beauty - I'd say it's subjective, beauty, but someone who is in love, a person who is in love with another, finds them beautiful, remember that beautiful line, that beautiful line in Les Enfants du Paradis,
Beauty resembles freedom 17:13 from the theater owner's daughter, at the Théâtre des Funambules, to Baptiste - isn't it, Jean-Louis Barrault - when she tells him 'you are beautiful because I love you,' isn't it? In any case, there is a link, I've seen it in every body of reflection, between love and beauty. On the other hand, the link with freedom is less obvious, and that's where I permit myself to tell Clomissile to go back, because I don't have time to go into detail, otherwise we'd change subject - I've already dealt in part, isn't it, but quite substantially still, with this link, both during a past session and during the answers to questions that ended it, so it was fairly well explored, in the cycle entitled 'Nature or Landscape'
18:08 let her go on our YouTube channel where all the videos are arranged in chronological order, isn't it, let her go to the 'Nature and Landscape' cycle and she'll see that from the second episode of that cycle onward - if necessary I'll leave on our Facebook page the reference, the exact number of the video - I try to explain this relation between love and freedom by which I ended the first session on The Rhinegold during the current cycle, where, since it was at the end of the session, I perhaps didn't dwell on it, where I said, you know, I sum it up like this, if there were only one thing to remember, freely given, because the demonstration would extend the time allotted to us too considerably, I see so many opportunities to come back to it that it's not free either, I said,
19:19 you know, when we question Loge, the god of fire, when Wotan tells him 'get me out of this,' the giants want to keep Freya, or else how can I keep Freya while satisfying them? Loge says 'you've gotten yourself into a fine mess,' because what being in the universe - I who am fire, who go everywhere, up, down, into the underground world to forge metals, into the upper world, isn't it, where the sun lights our world - what do you want to find?
19:49 You can question every being from every region of the universe, none will place anything above love, isn't it? And you see that the myth doesn't only say nonsense - statistically, if we took a poll, the myth would be right, statistically. Except one, it says, the one who preferred gold to love, isn't it? And I had said, I even take up from there the problem: if love is so important for almost the whole of humanity, and if for almost the whole of humanity it's what matters most,
20:34 My own answer, which I give you freely for such important things - you can well imagine I don't want to settle it just like that, but if I'm asked my opinion, I'd say love is not what is most important, but I'm not diminishing its intensity at all by saying that, far from it, on the contrary - because I say, what makes it seem to each and every one of us, your humble servant included, I don't know why I'd exempt myself at this level, what makes it seem, each time we are its prey, the most important thing, is because it's in the encounters we have in life, love and the beauty that triggers it - no matter what it portrays, it appears, is what most resembles what is most important, namely freedom - that's where the link with freedom lies, that is, when something in appearance gives, rightly or wrongly, the impression of expressing freedom - I had even said this is an enormous injustice, because I have seen
21:44 in black Africa in particular, women of 120 kilos dance with a suppleness I'll never have with my 49 kilos, and display a freedom of gesture, of grace, of extraordinary movement, isn't it? So, but somehow, statistically, in the unconscious - there, I'm in the process of demonstrating a bit the link I make between freedom and beauty - in the unconscious of each and every one of us, excess weight, for example, will be connoted with submission to the law, isn't it?
22:25 With being weighed down in the material world and in submission to the law - here, the law of falling - freedom goes upward and falling goes downward, there, it's as stupid as that. That's also what makes us teach children to be racist from a young age without meaning to, isn't it? When we say, look how cute the little bear cub is, when a bear can tear your head off with one careless swipe of its claw, a teddy bear, well - and a lizard, well, it's ugly and all, because it has a face like that, in fact, because it opens its mouth, has bulging eyes, poor lizard - as a result, it gets credited with being more determined by wickedness, by need, by appetite, and in fact it's completely unfair, because a lizard is much less dangerous than a bear, trust me, except for the very rare lizards that grow over a meter long, which are very rare, in our parts anyway, and which exist here and there in the Australian desert, for example, the gila monster,
23:35 there's one that's vaguely venomous in its bites. So, there you go. And - second, first correction - the importance of linking love, beauty, and freedom. So, already with Mnemosyne I hadn't grasped anything, I reassure her, we'll talk about memory again, isn't it? So, I've decided, between us, terminologically, I have to say it, the human sciences, as opposed to the hard sciences, the human sciences, the social sciences, culture as opposed to nature, I've decided to group all that under a heading called the sciences of history, or historical sciences, as you like.
Contrarian memory, Wotan's fall, and moraline 24:33 We're already in memory. Ah, it's not individual memory - oh, I remember I was three years old, my grandmother... no, it's collective memory, isn't it? So, I reassure her, I understand it was complicated, I'll sum up in a nutshell what I said throughout the whole cycle on memory, if I can summarize it very briefly like this, it's that it's less mysterious than we think, isn't it?
25:04 Namely, and stripping away all my abstract detours, that the mechanism of memory in each of us is at every instant thwarted by its opposite. I'm making a pleonasm on purpose, isn't it? Or a terrible redundancy. I mean by that that we need memory to go back into the past, but at the same time there's a threshold beyond which we don't go, because - I took the example of Oedipus - we have no interest in knowing exactly what happened, because that would disturb the somewhat gratifying image we have of ourselves.
25:45 That would contradict, isn't it, what, for example, in the Freudian field, is called the 'Ideal-Ich,' the 'ego ideal,' isn't it? When memory goes back a bit far, we notice that there are quite a few memories, when they come back to mind, often in spite of us, that contradict this somewhat idealized image each of us has of himself or herself. So, there you go. And last point: the moral isn't very moral for once. So there, it's because she may have gone as far as the end of The Rhinegold, but she hasn't gone - he hasn't gone, sorry - to the end of the Ring tetralogy.
26:23 The fact is it's going to end very badly for Wotan, isn't it? He's going to be carried off - I can say it since this isn't a detective story - he's going to be carried off at the end of Twilight of the Gods by the fire that ravages Valhalla and which is lit by his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde, isn't it? The Valkyrie, the sublime figure who recalls a bit the Greek Antigone. Of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world, says Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics in Berlin, old Hegel to his listeners, of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world - he's not just talking about theater, literature, music, art in general - of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world, and I know them all, he's an expert.
27:07 He lets slip a little cry of pride there, but he catches himself right away by saying, and everyone can and must know them. Of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world - I'll stop the suspense - Antigone, it seems to me, Sophocles' Antigone, seems to me the most perfect, the most satisfying. Here is a story valid in every place and every time. In it, femininity and virility are individualized. There, I'm not commenting for now, I devoted a book to commenting on this passage, I don't know if you know, it's called Femininity and Community in Hegel.
27:46 I owe that bit of advertising to my publisher, Delga. So, it ends very badly for Wotan, and Valhalla will fall far short of providing the security for which he had it built, isn't it? Alberich, to avenge himself for having been stripped of everything - which Clomissile saw very well - won't stop doing undermining work, literally, won't stop gnawing away from underneath at the edifice of Valhalla, which will end up collapsing in the end.
28:18 So, he doesn't go to paradise at all. There, I say that to reassure her, not to restore morality - because morality in the sense of what ought to be, that this or that should happen, it's rather pointless, it's what Nietzsche called at that level, moraline - or, to quote someone apparently very different from Nietzsche since he was a Christian, but one of the rare Christians Nietzsche set apart with a great deal of admiration, I'm thinking of Pascal - Pascal, in a famous formula, said true eloquence mocks eloquence, true morality mocks morality.
Scientific socialism versus utopian socialism 29:02 There. So I now come back, it's time to get into the scientific matter, to Bastien Castillo's question - he follows us very faithfully for quite a while now, and whom I didn't know outside the net, and so I had the pleasure of having him on the phone quite recently to ask his permission, of course, to take his long question, which I'm going to read to you as our starting point, as our base camp - like realist mountaineers, isn't it - for our laborious ascent toward a possible answer to the question, isn't it, how can the sciences of history be real?
29:55 So, here it is, Bastien says - yes, I decided to take it as a starting point because, and he does us all a great service, he sums up a bit, and in that sense, you see, he corrects the aspect that irritated Clomissile a little, and I understand her, with my detours, the somewhat muddled aspect, isn't it - but, and this should reassure Clomissile, Bastien has clearly seen the coherence in all this, and for that, it's true one has to hang in there, go back a bit further, I gave an example with Nature and Landscape earlier - and so his question is very interesting because it sums up many of the problems from previous cycles which come together as never more topical than at the moment when we must answer the question about these sciences of history, of knowing how they are real.
30:53 Good evening, I have a question, I quote him now, relating to the disagreement Léo had expressed about the scientificity in action of dialectical and historical materialism. I recall here that our comrade Léo Bernus - comrade and friend, whom I'm glad to have met and whose contributions I always appreciate - had been troubled, or had been surprised that I could take a certain distance from the notion of scientific socialism - I don't reject it, far from it, but I was taking distance without being more precise and measured, which isn't at all diplomatic, it's not at all what suits my position exactly, namely that, thanks to the advances of Marxism, of Marx, of Engels, later of Lenin, who did considerable theoretical work, a socialism - it's a political doctrine, I mean -
32:03 a socialism, a new socialism appeared - for the movement existed before Marx, roughly, a little before, it coincides with the beginning of the development of the working class - a new socialism appeared, which had the merit of not being only in mystification, opinion, delusion, fantasy, but which was, this is a formula of Engels, scientific socialism, opposed here to socialism - in the classics of Marxism, this scientific socialism is opposed only to utopian socialism, which is its exact antonym in Marxist literature, isn't it?
32:48 Utopian - I come back a bit to what I was saying just now when answering Clomissile - that morality, in the subjective sense, is only what-ought-to-be, that's what utopia is, it's what should be, isn't it? In the ideal, that's how the ideal city should be, it's a bit like that, that we long considered Plato's Republic - it took Hegel to understand that in his Republic, Plato, far from imagining a future city, was only expressing his present historical and political situation, and the threats surrounding the city.
Breaking with opinion: science, knowledge, and truth 33:31 So, I apply that here: utopian socialism has the flaw of all thought about what-ought-to-be, whereas if there is a common point - and here we come back into our cycle - between philosophy and the sciences, it's that both want to break with opinion, with doxa, with the back of the cave, in Platonic terms, with the corner café, I could also say, so we understand each other, though each time I specify that I have nothing against the corner café so long as truth is not at stake - it's not the place, isn't it, where truth suddenly arises, one goes there to discuss the last match, we'll never agree, isn't it, about OM versus PSG, and Bastia or Nantes, whatever, or to show off, buying a round for one's friends, or on the contrary, to sponge off others by getting them to pay - the point is, we're not there for
34:41 we're there for very important things, isn't it, if only a certain form of sociability which is indispensable to everyone, even if everyone can find something other than the corner café to achieve it - their football team, I don't know, their bridge club, for some, isn't it, or playing chamber music and finding their companions through instrumental or vocal practice, in a choir - well, let's leave that, it's not the place of truth, there are other purposes which I'm careful not to devalue, but still, so, what is common to philosophy and science is to break with a discourse where, when a true proposition arises, it's entirely by chance, isn't it, at the limit, it's not the primary concern of those settings, so,
35:51 to prefer truth to opinion, and therefore science, knowledge in the etymological sense of science, scire — I recall that this is a Latin verb that simply means "to know." I'm obliged to make these reminders, which are so simple that we forget them, so fundamental are they, and that's precisely why they aren't seen clearly. But when a boy, a kid, a boy or a girl of 4 or 5 years old, repeating the adults, is asked how much, says "that makes 5."
36:27 We cannot say that at that moment he knows the sum of 2 and 2. Agreed? So his sentence does not express knowledge. He believes he knows in his head, but there is a long way from consciousness to science. One only has to read Hegel's Phenomenology to see the whole immense path that spans several millennia, leading from consciousness full of mystification to science, which demands a hard journey.
37:03 So you see, these are basic reminders. I am saying that the verb "to know," or rather the noun, this is knowledge and not opinion, can only apply when there is truth. A knowledge that is not true is a contradiction, it's like a square circle. 2 and 2 equals 5 does not express knowledge. It's simpler put that way, isn't it? So there it is, and I recall this again to explain Léo Bernus's position, which Bastien alluded to, which proves he's following well what we said on this subject.
The Marxist corpus as a set of disciplines 37:49 Léo, a militant — and he's quite right, isn't he — militant, well, not for a particular sect, but a militant of the Marxist cause, was surprised that I could — not "snub," to use a Clouscardian term, right — but that I could say that the texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin do not constitute a science in actu — now I'm summarizing the essential point, that's what had troubled and perhaps shocked Léo, I understand it — do not constitute a science in actu, but that this is also not a return to opinion or to the contingency of the utopian socialists, and so on, and to fantasy; and between the two I had found a word that seemed to me could achieve consensus: disciplines.
38:53 Everyone who has been subjected to a discipline, whether sporting, linguistic, pianistic — right? I'll dwell just a few seconds on musical discipline — when people said to Mozart, "how gifted you are!", he would answer, listen, I've been grinding away several hours a day since the age of three, I mention this in passing — well, that's a discipline too. So it's not just anything, I mean, there's nothing reductive in my saying that the Marxist corpus provides us with a series of disciplines — economic, historical, political — that's not reductive at all. So, having explained this exchange I had with Léo, I can pick up and continue Bastien's question: I have a question regarding the disagreement Léo expressed about the actual scientificity of dialectical and historical materialism. So I'll go back one last time before continuing — he's quite right to specify "in actu," that's why I say
Marx made the sciences of history possible 40:03 that his question is very well formulated, insofar as it's not a question of my denying — and I confirm this today — that the most important quotient of the advances made by Marx — I speak of him in the singular here — is to have, through his analyses, opened or lifted the barrier that prevented us from taking the road leading to sciences of history. So he made the sciences of history possible — that's it.
40:35 For my part, and sticking to Marx's text — sorry, Bastien adds — for I admit having been troubled and stimulated by your exchange — there too, I pause — troubled and stimulated, I tell you that's well put. I don't know whether Bastien, who is currently finishing — forgive me for telling his life story, well, nothing very confidential — who is currently finishing a philosophy degree, had started with a curriculum in mathematics, in science — so he's a very well-suited interlocutor for the reflection in the current cycle — and perhaps in his philosophy studies, when the origins of philosophy were discussed, his professors, I don't know, must have talked to him about Socrates — I don't know if he learned this, but in any case I'll act as if he hadn't, and say that, perhaps without knowing it, he is rediscovering exactly what Socrates's contemporaries said
41:45 about what was most decisive in him: that he was at once troubling and stimulating. Troubling, because he asked questions that made you suddenly realize you no longer knew anything of what you thought was clear. I repeat this for Clomissile: being troubled is rather a fruitful moment, it must not be a blockage — so much so that Plato has Socrates say that when one is thus somewhat completely lost, it should be compared to the pains of childbirth, that is, fruitful pains, not deadly ones.
42:18 So there we have troubled, stimulated — I admit having been troubled, stimulated by your exchange, that is, the exchange between Léo and myself. For my part, and sticking to Marx's text — so clearly Bastien has had to grapple with it, which isn't always easy; there are passages in Marx that are very clear, others much more arduous — I had understood that the scientificity of Marxism resides in the very basis of dialectical and historical materialism. Two points: to study the real world — so you see, this confirms that, against the utopian socialism that preceded Marx, I don't know, the Proudhons and so many others, against utopian socialism, the sciences of history must apply, like all sciences moreover, to what is and not to what ought to be.
43:12 There are very few lines, compared to the tens of thousands of lines Marx wrote, devoted to what the communist world should be. Very few — there are a few small allusions, particularly in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and the Erfurt Programme, and in a few others, and in his correspondence — but I mean, the vast majority of his corpus, as the title of his masterwork, Capital, indicates, is devoted to looking at what exists, namely capitalist exploitation, how it functions.
43:42 Afterward, we may agree, we may disagree with capitalism — that's another problem — but if we want to get rid of it, we'd better know how it works. Thus, to go back to the Ring, you see, when Brünnhilde wants to avenge Siegfried's betrayal — we'll come to that later — she has to ask Hagen, Alberich the Nibelung's son, she says: I'll ask him, it seems Siegfried is invulnerable ever since he bathed in the dragon's blood, but doesn't he have a small flaw in his armor?
44:18 And Hagen will eventually tell her that there is a small spot between his two shoulders where a weapon can be planted and that there he is vulnerable. There you go. Or rather the reverse — it's Hagen who asks Brünnhilde. There. So, if we want to get rid of it — I'll finish my comparison — of capitalism, we need to know how it works, and the current situation shows that it is not invulnerable, to reuse my comparison with Siegfried, isn't that so?
Aside on vaccines and vulnerability 44:53 Because this is going to open up a whole can of worms, so I'll stop here with this first foray into immediate current events, which I never lose sight of, even when I'm talking about prehistory — namely that it was never a question, in the setbacks we're experiencing, a scandal, of the vaccination rollout, where we find that only 75,000 French people have been vaccinated — every time we're promised millions of doses, only 75,000 French people have actually undergone, mind you, both phases of the vaccine. It's by far the most behind of the European countries, and now we're told, oh yes, demand is stronger than expected, the suppliers, the tap is running dry, yes — and yet there are Russian and Chinese vaccines available that are never mentioned, and faced with the French and European fiasco, because Europe came very late to ordering vaccines, so much so that AstraZeneca was forced to tell Brussels
46:03 "as for us, it's been in circulation for three months and you waited three months to ask us; we were bound to supply those who had ordered it before you" — an allusion to the United States. So, faced with this fiasco, Hungary, which is part of the European Union, said "what if we looked at the Russian vaccine?" I imagine the reaction: "you can't be serious, the Russians, they're subhumans" — well, that's how people talked in the Nazi era, but there are still some who think it, I mean, let's not forget that the Slavs, that's where "slaves" comes from.
46:39 An expression I use myself: the Russian is the Black man of whiteness. The Black man doesn't exist as such, but in social representation, that is, the bottom of the social barrel, it's not the Black man within the white race, it's the Russian. What the colonized is to the colonizer — to come back to French history — is what the Pole is to the German, and what the Russian is to the Pole. You see? All right, let's be serious.
47:11 So nobody mentions the Russian vaccine. Now it has been evaluated, and we learn this morning that between the WHO and the Anglo-Saxon bodies, they have evaluated it and it is 92% effective. Whereas AstraZeneca — I'm forbidden to say more, because I've just learned that our authorities have approved it except for people over 65, for whom it's not reliable. Right? And that was Hungary. So people said, yes, but you see what that is, it's a strongman regime, so it gets along with Putin, all that, they're populists, it's marginal, it's just Hungary — and suddenly now it's Germany, with Chancellor Merkel herself, deciding to order a million doses of the Chinese and Russian vaccines.
47:59 So there, that's to tell you that things are going rather badly, that there are vulnerabilities — to come back to my point — and that it's better to apply oneself to what is than to what ought to be. Otherwise we breed dreams and daydreams that don't always have the beauty and depth of real dreams. We'll come back to that distinction another time. However, Bastien continues — I take it up and continue — the very basis of the dialectical and historical materialism founded by Marx, that's understood, is that we must study the real world in its contradictions, which brings us back to dialectics, in order to understand the whole of the human world, ideology included, therefore.
The 1859 preface, a maximum of Marx in a minimum of lines 48:50 However, it's clear that we must distinguish the study of matter — you see a clear allusion to the hard sciences — from that of ideological forms, because it's the first study — so, careful, now we're getting to the heart of the matter — that of matter, which can be done, he quotes Marx, in quotation marks, "with the precision of natural science." He's obviously alluding to that famous 1859 preface that I've quoted to you so often, that text of which I say there's the most Marx packed into the fewest lines — there's a maximum of Marx in a minimum of lines, sorry for the bad pun — and in which, which is very rare, Marx sums up his thought. We even drew a parallel with Hegel, who hates being told "summarize your thought in one sentence" — for Hegel, as for Marx, it's the development that matters, isn't it, and thus the detail, not just for those who are lazy and find an aphorism from some nobody more profound — I won't say Nietzsche, since that's too obvious — but nowadays there are some who quote Cioran to me, who was a collaborator, more Nazi than the average Pétainist,
50:00 I mean, well, I'm going to get worked up — anyone is free to leave whatever comment they want on my page, but I'd like it not to be sullied with that kind of reference, sub-Heideggerian, which is really saying something in terms of pejorativeness. So, this text which sums up the maximum of Marx in the minimum of lines, I had — I recall here, for those who may have jumped on the train mid-journey — that this text is the preface written by Marx, published in 1859, drafted between '57 and '59, a preface to what — this work which was thus written in that period — its title is "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy."
50:59 I don't want to dwell on this — it's not the central subject — but even just analyzing the title, note firstly that this is the title Marx originally intended to give to Capital; it's along the way that he changed it and gave it that much shorter title, Capital — but it was supposed to be called "Critique of Political Economy." And in this preface, then, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — second remark, which proves to what extent Marxism is not a new economics, revolutionary as it may be, that would come and add itself, you see, in the division of the human sciences, to classical bourgeois political economy, Smith, Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, and so on —
51:42 No, no, no — it's on the contrary a critique of political economy as a discipline in general, that is, of its pretension to remain autonomous within the so-called human or social sciences, etc., which we grasp in their truth when we call them historical. And so in this preface there are two pages that are a high point and that begin with this important sentence: "The general result at which I arrived, and which, once won, served as the guiding thread for my studies" — this is quite rare for Marx to speak this way, meaning here it's pure gold, solid gold, isn't it?
52:23 Marx, firstly, says "the result at which I arrived" — so here, without confusing it with all the winding paths he had to take to reach it, the difficulty of the ensuing analyses — this result, which served as a guiding thread — there's the invariance: that means that if you forget everything else, you find all the detail of Marx again by focusing on this preface — this preface which is hated, including often by Marxists, including even within the communist movement by some, precisely because it is so clear, so unambiguous, that it refutes those who have let themselves be influenced by the reactionary bourgeois ideology of relativism, according to which there would be as many Marxes as there are readers of Marx, more or less — you see, that would be convenient for the MEDEF.
53:12 Do you remember the battle between Plato and the sophists, particularly between Plato and Protagoras — well, Socrates and Protagoras — Protagoras who said the wine tastes sweet to you, so it is sweet; it tastes bitter to you, so it is bitter. There is nothing objective to say about the wine — go explain that to a wine expert, right. So I specify here that this text is essential, and to finish my recap of this text that Bastien is alluding to, I recall that it is divided into two parts — this is your servant speaking now — I permit myself to note that I'm surprised there aren't more commentators on Marx, more exegetes, who insist on this dichotomy that I see in this text: that it is divided into two parts that almost contradict each other — but not at all in the sense of a blunder, it's not an unnoticed contradiction, it's on the contrary very deliberate — in a first part, Marx sets out what one might call basic, ordinary Marxism — we'll even see that the metaphor of the base is found here, that is, a spatial metaphor, there's the bottom and the top, is perfectly justified —
Infrastructure, superstructure, and contradiction 54:22 where he recalls that there's what's in the head, up above, and then there's what's below, the economy, the material productive forces, right — this is what everyone knows even from a distance about Marx, and who believes it's enough to know this division to be a Marxist, especially by saying that what is below determines what is above, which is exact in a purely arithmetical sense, but which is false from the point of view of abstraction. Let me explain: so there's the infrastructure, infra meaning below, which determines the super, above, structure — you see, I insist on the spatial side, as if there were no time, whereas I'm talking to you about the sciences of history, of which this text serves as the foundation, right, for the sciences of history — and here we are, full stop, new paragraph, second major part: I quoted you, I skipped a few passages, "at a certain stage of development," at a certain degree of their development, sorry, "the productive forces of society come into contradiction with the relations of production"
55:32 within which they had developed up until then — let's translate into plain terms: the productive forces, let's say the plow in the Middle Ages, for example, of society, the plow on one hand, the mill for grinding wheat grains on the other, the productive forces of society come into contradiction — now this is purely material, the productive forces, the plow, the mill — come into contradiction with the relations of production — there again is the word production, but it's no longer the productive forces, it's the relations of production, and the relations — while the productive forces are a purely economic and material notion, the relations of production are a political notion, because Marx immediately adds, in case one didn't understand what he calls relations of production, "the relations of production, or, what is but a legal expression for the same thing, the property relations within which they had been moving before" — just as I gave you the plow and the mill, the windmill or hand-mill, or one driven by a donkey, or by slaves, as examples of productive force,
56:44 I give you as an example of relations of production within which it develops, here feudalism — so much so that one could say the hand-mill gives you feudal lordship, the steam-mill gives you the bourgeoisie — and there we see clearly to what extent, in the first part, the productive forces determine the relations of production, don't we? And the relation between the two, between productive forces and relations of production, I'm obliged to make these reminders, defines — third appearance of the word production, third variant — the mode of production. Productive force — there are only three, I reassure you — productive force, relation of production, mode of production. Productive force, a purely material and economic notion; relation of production, where the legal and thus the political come in — who owns this mill?
57:38 To which lord must one pay a toll when crossing the bridge over a river? Thirdly, the relation between the two: when you take, as a whole, the economic side of a society — you're starting to understand to what extent Marxism cannot be reduced to an economism — a debt Althusser must be given, he did see this. So much so that there's a chapter in Reading Capital titled "That Marxism Is Not an Economism"
58:10 and which he had already developed in For Marx. When you take the whole of a historical figure — we're getting there — of what historians, Marxist or not, call, I don't know, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Greek or Cretan or Babylonian antiquity — each time, what characterizes these moments, to use a Hegelian term, is the relation of productive forces to relations of production, the relation between the two defining a mode of production.
The succession of modes of production and time 58:50 And at the end of this famous preface, Marx says — going very quickly, since it's only a preface, right — that in history you can see succeeding one another the Asiatic mode of production, which is broadly linked to the domestication of water. Broadly, dams — you know it began that way between the Tigris and the Euphrates and on the Nile, right? Or in China or in India. It's along the great rivers that the very first urban civilizations developed, for example. So, writing, everything that is properly historical in the strict sense.
59:24 I say this because sometimes it seems like — I confess I use "historical" in two senses. Sometimes in the strict sense I just recalled, and not history before writing. Sometimes I take history in the sense of praxis, that is, from the moment man began pushing back nature, right, by building huts on stilts in prehistory. There — occasions to come back to this will not be lacking. So, the Asiatic mode of production, then the slave-holding mode of production, roughly for the whole of Antiquity, right?
1:00:00 The slave is the pillar. You see, when you read history through Marx, you no longer look at the succession of emperors, kings, battles, and the Chevalier Bayard. That's interesting too. But I mean, what does it come to hide? I don't know, do you remember Brecht's beautiful poem? "They say kings built Thebes of the seven gates, but did the kings themselves haul the rocks? They say the Pharaohs built the pyramids, did the Pharaohs bend down over the sand? And when the Great Wall of China was built, where did the masons live?"
1:00:33 These are all the absent figures of classical pre-Marxian history, right — the producers, whom Edmond Rostand, in his play L'Aiglon, will designate with a phrase that celebrates "the little ones, the obscure, the ungraded ones" — that resurfaces here in our memory, a nod to the previous speaker — precisely, the slave is the pillar on which the whole slave-holding mode of production rests, in short, Antiquity.
1:01:12 Then there's the feudal mode of production, that's the Middle Ages, which follows Antiquity, then the mode that lasts up to the French Revolution with its variants — properly feudal, then monarchical, parliamentary monarchies, absolute monarchies, sub-types, whatever you like. And finally, the bourgeois or capitalist mode of production, of which Marx says it is the last one to date and that, since it pushed the historical contradictions between productive force and relations of production to the extreme, its abolition should bring about the end of human prehistory.
1:01:45 So there — well, I've spent, I've devoted time to it, but I think this fundamental text needed recalling. I remind you: introduction — you type that in, Marx, preface to '59, and you'll find it right away in several editions, and free of charge too, even on several Wikisources, so as a PDF. I repeat: Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859. I urge you, if I may say so, to reread this preface, of which I have only summarized the broad strokes; it isn't very long, it's three pages.
1:02:22 So I continue with Bastien's question: however, it's clear that we must distinguish the study of matter from that of ideological forms, because it's the first study that can be conducted with rigorous scientific precision. This is where he practically paraphrases, or very clearly alludes to, the text I just summarized, where Marx says that at a certain degree of their development, the material productive forces of society enter into contradiction with the relations of production within which they had moved until then.
1:03:02 So I'm surprised there aren't more readers of Marx who haven't noticed that in the first part, we weren't in Marxian truth, we were in Marxist abstraction. The starting abstraction, yes: there's the infrastructure which determines the superstructure, but it never happens that way, in a vertical, automatic, mechanical manner. I say this because there are many critics of Marx who would love to reduce him to mechanism. There are Marxists who play right into their hands, without even realizing it.
1:03:33 Now, Marx refutes this view in this preface by saying it never happens that way, because we had forgotten — we're not only in space, below, above. We're in time, we're in the historical sciences — I'm driving the point home. "At a certain stage of their development" — stage, development, we're back to Hegel. "The material productive forces of society come into contradiction" — so we'd need to know, according to a certain very reductive Marxism, in my view, the superstructures express the infrastructures, or if you prefer to put it the other way, the infrastructures are the truth of what is in my head.
1:04:18 Seen from a distance, that's not entirely inaccurate, but here, he's saying the opposite. He's saying that the relations, the new productive forces — the appearance of the steam engine at the end of the 18th century — will overturn the feudal world and make it hand over the reins from the feudal mode of production, which had lasted for centuries, to the mode of production we're still in, right, the bourgeois, industrial, capitalist one. So I recall here Marx's sentence: "at a certain stage of their development, these productive forces enter into contradiction" — so you see, the top no longer expresses the bottom, the top is in contradiction with the bottom, because there has been a shift, because there are differences in speed between the pace at which technical progress develops — putting a collar on the horse, right, in the 12th century, in the Middle Ages, was an enormous advance in the yield of our lands, because until then, when the horse pulled, it choked itself, and with that big leather collar you see in old engravings, the horse could pull,
1:05:29 well, it would take a big effort, but I mean, it no longer choked itself — just that alone, right, the horse-collar — these are advances in the development of productive forces, and of course the mechanization that began developing at the end of the 18th century and especially in the 19th century. So let me open a parenthesis, because I can already see some of you frowning, the detractors of machines, right, and the die-hard degrowthers, and this can find an echo among those who, rightly, find it unbearable when progress in robotization leads to the layoff of human labor forces that had been doing the job up to then.
1:06:17 I recall — and that's where I had left off — that when the industrial revolution took hold, particularly at the start of the 19th century, not only did it not eliminate work, but it created millions of jobs around the machine, more than there had ever been. I recall this in passing, and that it created the society from which most of those listening to me are descended, namely people who don't spend their whole lives just earning a living, which had been the case for the peasantry for centuries.
Ideological forms are forms of the real 1:06:48 So, having explained these allusions that Bastien makes to Marx's text, it's clear that we must distinguish, Bastien says, the study of matter from that of ideological forms, because it's the first study that can be done in a scientifically rigorous way. This is my last dive into Marx's text, but when he speaks of ideological forms, it's not vague, it's very precise — Marx says that, and I come back to these upheavals that arise when there's progress in the productive forces while the old relations of production are still there, there are certain aspects of Roman law that appeared 2500 years ago in the age of slavery which are still present in certain legislations, certain aspects — that's to tell you that it's not the same temporality that governs the relations of production and the productive forces.
1:07:44 It took a long time for the Marshall Plan to transform — and it took the genius of a Clouscard to develop this — to transform our sensibility, our ideology, our psyche, to this extent, and so on. So I'll make my last dive by specifying that what he calls the ideological forms refers to a passage where Marx says that this upheaval affects the world before, more or less quickly, to move on rapidly to that of the old relations of production, and he says: when one examines such changes — and here I slow down, I'm quoting Marx word for word — one must always distinguish the change that takes place in the material productive forces, which can be established in a scientifically rigorous manner, that's why Bastien puts "scientifically rigorous" in quotation marks in the question you have before you, and indeed I mean, you have to know that this table now — it takes just a few minutes
1:08:54 for a machine to produce it, whereas not long ago it took three days of labor to produce it, so that, that can be measured, that's scientifically rigorous, that's progress in productive force. And Marx says one must distinguish changes in the productive forces, which can always be demonstrated in a scientifically rigorous way, from the forms — and here watch out for the list: legal, religious, aesthetic, and so on, which I'll spare you the details of, in short there's a key category that sums up all these categories, that includes them — the aesthetic, the legal, the philosophical — the author of The Poverty of Philosophy, the same author who said "until now philosophers have only interpreted the world, now it must be transformed," at the end of the Theses on Feuerbach, would be astonished to see that we are still doing philosophy — what misery, what wretchedness, in the Latin sense, isn't it, miser, that's what it originally means. So one must distinguish them from the forms
1:10:04 aesthetic, legal, philosophical, religious, under which men — sorry, anyway — that's the word that sums up all the ideological forms. So when Bastien has the merit of recalling this expression "ideological forms," one must insist on "forms," because we're fascinated by "ideology," and rightly so, it's the category that includes all that, but let's not forget that in the world of superstructures, the world of ideologies, we're dealing with the real — we're not completely off in fantasy. That's the mistake of the traditional critique of religion, à la Voltaire or à la Feuerbach, to think it was mere foolishness, an error — it's a bit better when it's an alienation as in Feuerbach than as in Voltaire, but still it doesn't go further, which is what Marx criticizes in the Theses on Feuerbach. Whereas I mean, there is indeed something of the real in the superstructures, in what we have in our ideas, if you prefer, whether they be religious, scientific — sorry, I don't mean scientific, precisely — religious, aesthetic, philosophical
Cause and effect, measurement, and quantum physics 1:11:14 legal, etc., but it's only the form of the real that is present — that's important, the form, we'll come back to it, it's not nothing, the form, not the content, that's a bit more. However, and this time I continue directly, it's clear that we must distinguish the study of matter from that of ideological forms, because it's the first study, that of matter, which can be done in a scientifically rigorous way; the second, the study of ideological forms, the one to which I'd like us to apply ourselves when speaking of the sciences of history, but in a manner as scientific as the one that has proven itself in the sciences of nature — that's exactly our subject, we're at the heart of it. The second, sticking to what you had — he wants to propose to define a science — is instead in the domain of disciplines, because it's impossible to establish a cause-and-effect type relation, the kind that triumphs in physics, astrophysics, etc.
1:12:12 Must I remind you that I specify each time that when I summarize the sciences of nature, particularly physics — that's not the case for mathematics, which is not a science of nature; all the sciences of nature need mathematics, mathematics needs them in its formulation, and in its history there's been a back-and-forth, problems often coming from astronomy have inspired many mathematical equations — but in its formulation, mathematical objects owe nothing to physical objects at any rate. I recalled last time that equality, which plays a fundamental role in all doctrines, the mathematical corpus, the relation of equality — for instance the relation of equivalence — equality is only a particular case, to speak more rigorously, alongside parallelism, and so on — equality doesn't exist either in nature or in matter, to the point that Leibniz the philosopher used to walk his listeners through a park and challenge them to find in the park two leaves that were rigorously identical. That's what's extraordinary
1:13:23 is that it's with this tool, mathematical objects which correspond to no external reality — because I was going to say objective, no, there's nothing more objective than if A equals B equals A, there's nothing subjective about it — but even more external than the external world, is that the external world bends to notions forged by human thought, like number, the straight line. Look, every time we take a measurement, there's no science without measurement, there's only science of what's measurable — the meter, the centimeter — but those are conventions, you're not going to tell me that the meter existed in nature before man defined it, once by the length of the standard kept in the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, and now in a somewhat finer way, from an isotopic oscillation, a much more precise method — for the rest, ask the Paris Observatory, which has in its basement one of the finest measuring instruments in world technology, clocks so precise that NASA often borrows
1:14:34 this French technology, these instruments for measuring durations and spaces — and lengths. So, to come back to it, when I speak of the cause-effect relation, the pairing that governs the whole of the sciences of nature, I recall that I take it in the broad sense — cause-effect is of course the pairing that defines determinism, in other words the law: heat expands bodies, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed — well, the law of conservation of energy, the law of expansion, and so on, and Archimedes' principle already had the form of a law, and of course the law of falling bodies, the law of universal gravitation — to arrive at all these laws which express a determination and which are expressed in a way far removed from ordinary language and its ambiguities
1:15:44 the one I use, with its imprecisions and approximations, uses an algorithm in the style of y equals f of x — y is a function of x, y depends on x, y is determined by x. So when Marx says there's a determination of the superstructures by the infrastructures, he's taking up the model y equals f of x — we're in determinism. But, and here I dwell on it, in the sciences of nature I say everything is governed by the cause-effect pairing, determinism here being able to be statistical and not only mechanical — quantum physics has shown that there are zones, to this day irrefutably, of indeterminacy. For instance, one cannot, to take the most emblematic example, measure at the same time the position and the velocity of an elementary particle, because the manipulations we're forced to carry out experimentally to obtain that localization and to measure that velocity precisely disturb the velocity as much as the position
1:16:54 So there it is, it's not at all because it's so complicated that we can't manage it, it's because it's our own cognitive stance that comes here to alter what was there. It's as if someone wanted to illuminate their garden at night with a 1000, 2000, 3000, 10,000-watt floodlight in order to see how it looks when they're not there — that's a bit contradictory, because precisely when they're not there, it isn't lit up. So yes, I do take into account the margin of indeterminacy that exists in quantum physics, but that's not at all a renunciation of causality — there is a causality that's even more rigorous and even more extensive in quantum physics. I say this to settle a few accounts with those who fumble with concepts when translating equations into everyday language — that's always what happens when one isn't careful — saying, in any case, that thanks to quantum physics the deterministic ideology has collapsed. No, it's a certain determinism
1:18:05 that has collapsed — a bijective relation, if you speak in mathematical terms, between each cause and each effect. But on the contrary, I mean, there's an extension of our predictability — we can predict even better, and thus determine what's going to happen, with quantum precision, believe me, even if it's statistical — we don't know exactly where the electron is, but we know it's between point X and point Y, to put it quickly, whereas before we thought we knew where it was and we were in fantasy. So Bastien recalls: it is, on the other hand, in the domain of disciplines, the study of ideologies, because it's impossible to establish a cause-effect type relation — implicitly, in the sciences of history, otherwise we would mechanize — he's very rigorous here, Bastien, and very consistent — what pertains to dialectics and therefore to freedom. It's very dense, his question, that's why I make so many interruptions to explain it, and it's an excellent summary of many, many sessions we've had
1:19:15 together, and no doubt of knowledge acquired elsewhere too — he makes a fine synthesis here, I mean elsewhere than in our lectures. The second, sticking to what you had proposed to define a science, is on the other hand — the second, the study of ideologies, is in the domain of disciplines, understood as a somewhat weaker word than science — because it's impossible to establish a cause-effect type relation as in physics, implicitly, otherwise we would mechanize what pertains to dialectics and therefore to freedom. Here too I'm obliged to stop and give reminders to those who get confused, and they're quite right sometimes, not to get confused, but to admit and make explicit that they are confused, because that's how real clarity comes, isn't it — that's what I called earlier the birth pangs, the labor pains that gave their name to the Socratic method called maieutics, from maia, meaning midwife, as Socrates said: I don't create the knowledge if you don't already have it in you, but I help you give birth to the knowledge you have in you — it's a beautiful metaphor, which proves
1:20:30 moreover — I come back to Mnemosyne — all knowledge is indeed recollection, one must give birth to the knowledge one had in oneself, that one knew but forgot. There it is. However, it's clear that we must distinguish the study of matter from that of ideological forms, because it's the first study that can be done in a scientifically rigorous way; the second, sticking to what you had proposed to define a science, is on the other hand in the domain of disciplines, because it's impossible to establish a cause-effect relation, otherwise we would mechanize what pertains to dialectics and therefore to freedom. It's a way of recalling a problem that had arisen from the last part of our long cycle, in our early years, seven years ago, on the philosophy of knowledge — I had ended on determinism, on the question "what can I know," I'm taking everything up again from the start, so I set aside here "what must I do," the moral, political, legal sciences — on the axiological question "what can I know," we had first given the empirical answer, the most spontaneous for everyone: what I know
What can I know? Empiricism, rationalism, determinism 1:21:40 is what's in front of me, what I touch, what I see. Then we saw how fragile that was — I look at the ground and see that it's not moving, whereas we're moving at 30 km a second around the sun — that's not nothing. Purely sensory experience is a far cry from scientific experimentation. In "Sion" [sensation?] there's something active that doesn't simply passively receive a sensation through the senses, like a dog with its nose, which is very useful for it but doesn't constitute a science. So it's very important to see here that at the end of this progression we had developed in the philosophy of knowledge — first answer, the empiricist answer to "what can I know": what I experience. Second answer, the antithesis of empiricism, rationalism: what I define with rigor — there we moved from the observation of the astrologers of antiquity to mathematics, where it's no longer at all about looking outward, because, as I just said a few minutes ago, it's not outside that I'll find
1:22:50 the point, the line, the plane, equality and so on, and even less certain numbers — I think again of Roman numerals which tried to be empirical in their numbering, with one stick for one, two sticks for two, three sticks for three, and by the time you get to four it already became too complicated for the eye, so a letter had to be introduced, and so on. So rationalism, which takes over from empiricism — I sum up and say the essential: in empiricism one must start with things, in rationalism one must start with statements, words, discourse — what mathematicians do, it starts with definitions, I call this such-and-such, I call it a line, I call it a parallelogram, there — and afterward one looks at everything that follows without contradiction from what has been stated, from what are called, as it happens, the first notions, those with which one must begin: definitions, axioms, postulates. You see, so we start with things in experience, we start with
1:24:00 words in rationalism. You guess that both are needed to make a science worthy of the name. And finally, the synthesis of the two: determinism, the one that decides that things in the external world — I don't know, the motion of the tides and the motion of the moon — are linked, there, we find causality and determinism again — are linked with the same order as the propositions in a mathematics textbook, there's a parallelism often noted regarding Spinoza — Spinoza says that the order and connection of things is the same as that of ideas, isn't it — and so that was the last step of our long answer to the question "what can I know," when we finally have determinism, emblem of science, today's science, and we can now advance on a comfortable and cleared road on which we haven't finished walking, but at least we know in which direction to go to continue extending this empire, of the law of determinism, of y equals f of x, and of causality, into domains that increasingly seemed never accessible
1:25:10 to science. At one time it was thought that the curve defied all measurement — you'd take a ruler and try to measure a round room, it's complicated — and then man discovered the number pi, and there, the curve became knowable. It was thought that one couldn't calculate surfaces enclosed not by squares, like a wheat field, or rectangles, but by curved lines, and in fact, starting from infinitesimal calculus in the 17th century, from Leibniz's method, thanks to derivatives, to primitives, to integrals, and so on, integral and differential calculus, one could calculate areas enclosed by curves, and so on. So the progress of science — that's a rather grandiose way of putting it, if we want to be more precise, it's progress, it's the progressive extension of y equals 2x to ever more extensive domains. For a long time it was believed that life was inaccessible to scientific knowledge
1:26:20 until the moment Claude Bernard analyzed what was called at the time the glycogenic function of the liver — if we translate the Greek into French, glucose, that's sugar, you know that, glycogenic, "gene" meaning that which engenders. Claude Bernard had discovered that the liver is a factory — not prophetic, as in antiquity it was said that the liver was the organ of prophecy — that the liver is a factory that manufactures sugar, and to establish that he acted scientifically: he measured, he weighed the quantity of sugar entering the liver and then the quantity coming out. Surprise — there was more coming out than going in, and modern biology began to exist from that moment on. He wasn't the only one, but starting from Claude Bernard he was one of those whose breakthroughs were decisive for founding the discipline, and I recall his most resounding formula: the living is the dead — the biological falls into the domain of what has triumphed in the physical and chemical. That's why you have a medicine such that life expectancy in this world
1:27:30 where people say we eat nothing but rotten things, that we eat garbage, to put it plainly, you hear that a thousand times a day, which is not very kind toward those who would love to have a tenth of it in much of the world and of humanity — where it is polluted by fine particles, by factory emissions, by industry, life expectancy is over 80 years, and where there is no industry — I lived in Niger, where life expectancy was 42 years, and it was 37 years here not so long ago in historical terms, one has to be reminded of that from time to time. So with determinism we arrived at the most adequate answer to the question "what can I know." But then — I've summarized the trajectory of the sciences — but wait, and philosophy? Well, that's a catastrophe for it, what we've just said, because philosophy has no object of its own — and now I'm using Bastien's text myself to review things he already knows
What must I do? Duty presupposes being able to do the opposite 1:28:40 but I remind those who are jumping on the moving train, and I thank them for doing so, what interests me is what philosophy has that is its own, not only what it shares with science. The question "what can I know" — an astronomer, a biologist, a mathematician asks it too, doesn't he — the philosopher asks himself the question "what can I know" too, but applied to a very specific domain of knowledge. The philosopher does not seek to know — I often say this to show the absurdity of the thing — how many grains of sand there are in the Australian deserts, or how many drops of water there are in the Mediterranean, to count them one by one — that's rather pointless. He seeks what can help him answer another question, "what can I know," to answer the question "what must I do" — not to cure my toothache, because that's not "what must I do," that's "what can I do," it's not a categorical imperative, because we haven't understood what "must" means. So "what must I do," when applied to going to the dentist
1:29:51 because if someone tells me "what must I do, I have a toothache," I tell them, go to the dentist, my God, we're not going to spend two minutes of philosophy reflecting on that question. What's the difference? It's that the verb "must" is a trap — you see how, in philosophy, we're not in science here, we're in everyday language with its polysemy, and here it's about the verb "must," what does "must" mean. So "what must I do" — an all the more important question, I'm not losing my thread, I sum it up, because this question, I'm proposing to show you, is where what is specific to philosophy resides, and therefore more than what it shares with others. For that I take two examples to show you two very different meanings — that's where you see we're not in math — two acceptations, not "acceptation," two acceptions, two very different meanings of the verb "must": when I say "I must eat to live," "I must respect the red light" — sorry to keep using the same examples, but it's for those jumping on the moving train, one must stay very basic, because the difference is obvious, we don't need me
1:31:01 or the philosopher to guess that it's not at all the same meaning. The verb "must" in "I must eat to live" is a natural necessity, everyone will agree, and in this sense there's an animal part in us that never ends until our death, the same one that can have — and then there's "I must respect the red light." Wait, the proof that it's not the same thing at all is that I cannot live without eating — suddenly I brought in another verb, "cannot," that's "can." So if we were honest, we shouldn't say "I must eat to live" as if I were asking myself "should I or shouldn't I" and had a choice — I don't have a choice, I cannot live without eating. So the verb "must" is misused here, you see philosophy is good for something after all, compared to everyday language, without even going as far as mathematics — I address Léo — and there we clearly see an example of how opinion can rise to the level of a discipline without yet being a science, but it's progress, there's not yet measurement and quantification, but still we've shown that the verb "must" is misused in "I must eat to live," it's a bit pretentious, it's "I cannot live without eating"
1:32:11 whereas, I can run the red light at two in the morning when there's no cop around, left, right, no car — never do this, I'm not tempting you, I'm saying it's possible, I didn't say it was advisable — I can, but I must not. There, we've understood the difference. The verb "must" only makes sense if I can do the opposite, if I have a choice, so if a freedom — there's the word — a minimum of freedom is given, between going left or going right, crossing or not crossing, running the red light or not, that's important, obeying or disobeying. There are moments, you know, when disobeying is a duty, as was the case for our resistance comrades during the last war, whether in London or, above all, in the Gestapo's cells, not denouncing their comrades — that's a duty, it's that one could do the opposite, and one decides among several paths
Freedom as a postulate; reductive neopositivism 1:33:21 that are offered — one, and only one. How well we've progressed in reading Bastien's text, you see how much synthetic value it has. Now I'm going to ask Philippe about our timing, if you don't mind — thanks, we've reached our hour and a half. You see, every time I ask, I must have a little clock in my head, less precise than the one I mentioned at the Paris Observatory, of course, but still I don't miss it by much, we always find ourselves around half past one, a little before or a little after, so let me check, and I'd like to leave room for questions, but still I'll continue because, in conclusion, Bastien writes: for all that, one cannot extend the cause-effect model to the human sciences, or else it would mean renouncing freedom — if determinism, which forces the moon to revolve around the Earth, it has no choice, whereas if we manage to create human sciences on that model, a Newtonian, Galilean, Einsteinian, Planckian model — Planck, since it's since Planck's constant
1:34:31 was defined numerically that there's been a true quantum physics — if we do that, every time the hard sciences come to occupy new territory, it's proof that in that territory freedom does not reign. So where the knowledge of the external world succeeds, our attempt to answer the question "what must I do" fails. I'll sum it all up now: when I take "must" in the strict sense, that is, "what must I do" when I have the freedom to do this or its opposite, because determinism reveals that in principle I don't have that freedom — so it's important to remember that Kant defined freedom as a postulate of practical reason. That sounds a bit like Chinese — Kant, Nietzsche said Kant was the great Chinaman of Königsberg — but it's valuable to be this precise in one's formulation, because he's saying it's a postulate, we haven't proven that freedom exists, but if it doesn't exist, there's no point in continuing to do philosophy — that's what we've discovered this evening
1:35:41 thank you Bastien for reminding us — let's come back to it quickly — namely that if there is no freedom, there's no point asking myself the question "what must I do," even granting that I find the answer by some miracle, I would still have to be able to act on it — if I don't have the means, it's not up to me to decide what I'm going to do or not do, I'm determined to do it, if we believe the determinists. And so, since we see that the determined puts the question at stake, we can finally continue our text — sorry, excuse me, I'm on it. So, for all that, says Bastien, and this is the end, I have trouble giving up the existence of a science — because from that standpoint one might say it's better that there be no human science, otherwise it would mean we're not free, and Bastien rightly says: yes, but then we have a second drawback — for all that, I have trouble giving up the existence of a science allowing us to know what pertains to man, because we would risk falling into various aporias — there I correct him a bit, he means falling into impasses, into drifts — an aporia
1:36:54 is an apparent difficulty that the sophists presented to their interlocutor — for example, starting from how many pebbles can we speak of a heap? The Greeks adored this kind of problem — starting from how many hairs can we speak of a bald man or not, is someone with three hairs on their scalp bald, or do we have to wait until they have 50? In short, thresholds — but that's fruitful, it allows us to raise problems of the continuous and the discontinuous, and so aporia, as Ricœur once said, aporia is an aperitif — that's a pun, aporie/apéritif — aporia can put us on the path of research. So he means here rather that he's denouncing drifts or impasses. So thus we can distinguish the sciences — sorry, yes, for lack of giving up science, and if we give up science we risk falling into various aporias — postmodernism, you know, he goes very fast but he's right — all the mysticisms, the stuff, the return to Eastern religions, the paths to Kathmandu, neo-shamanism, isn't it, it has to come from the United States as it happens, shaman comes from the Native Americans, the Redskins — positivism
1:38:06 the opposite — as much as positivism was progress in Auguste Comte's time against the obscurantism of the idealism of that era, so much is neo-positivism, after Freud and Marx, a regression and a reduction of the advances made in rationalism, in the extension not only of our speculation but of our experimentation. Everyone — let's be clear, before we part, everyone can experience that on Sunday, even in the most working-class, most proletarian milieu, one makes a little effort at the meal when inviting friends or buddies — I often use this example — one puts out a slightly nicer tablecloth than usual, better ironed and stain-free if possible, one does a little decoration — I've said this before, radishes around the sausage, I don't know why, but it's probably because I'm hungry, because Corsican charcuterie is the best in the world, there, excuse me, that slipped out, I'm not imposing it — all these details are experimentally verifiable, and there I come back to science
1:39:16 the positivist, for whom none of that — sorry, I mean, one can experiment statistically — how many cultures, civilizations, peoples, human families are there in which what's considered an accessory detail, not indispensable for biological survival, is absent? So that doesn't concern the scientific study of the meal, these people confuse the meal and the act of eating — as if we wouldn't eat if there weren't hunger, and that's purely natural, the hunger instinct, that's natural, that determines the act of eating, what a lion does with a gazelle, and we even say "devour" in that case, that may be so in nature, yes, but a meal is not only eating, it's precisely everything I just spoke of, it's a certain decoration which adds nothing in lipids, carbohydrates, or proteins to the biological program, to the biological necessity. So neo-positivism is reductive, is a regression, even a scientific one
1:40:26 even from a scientific and experimental standpoint, compared to the advances of Marxism and/or psychoanalysis, for other subjects — the infant, and even, thumb-sucking, believe me, I'm not sure that at the outset it answers to a necessity — if at the outset, yes, to a biological necessity, but when it continues beyond a certain age, there are other reasons that must be sought on the side of Uncle Sigmund. So I come to my question, we're finishing — is it not possible to refound everything we call science — this time both the science of history and the hard sciences, my friend Bastien — because that gives unity to our discussion and sums it up by unifying them through determinism — there is science where I can say this is a function of that, y equals f of x. Then you say, wait, we're back to square one, so freedom doesn't exist — thus we could distinguish the sciences of natural matter, this is the last paragraph that answers your concern — thus we could distinguish the sciences of natural matter, there I'm glad to see I've been heard, sorry
Natural matter, historical matter, and free determination 1:41:37 but I keep insisting that those who speak of "nature" would do well to speak of "matter" instead — the most generic set, the most extensive set, set in the mathematical sense here, within which I make a first partition: there's natural matter — I don't know what's happening in the galaxies beyond our own, or even within our own — and historical, human, cultural matter, call it what you like, but a non-natural matter, in the sense that, in language, you're the first to agree, you distinguish plastic flowers from natural flowers — I'm talking about flowers, not breasts — to show you that, in general, the whole human world is surrounded by artifice — in "artificial" you have "art," art in the ancient sense where the Greeks said techné for art, from the moment something comes to replace what is natural, or to extend it, well, to extend it or to considerably multiply its power, we're no longer in the natural world. So, as much as the tides
1:42:47 are a natural phenomenon, so much is a field — a field, and as I often say, a Romanesque chapel in the middle of a wheat field, everything people believe to be rather beautiful, nature — it's not nature at all. The wheat field is a colossal effort of the body, of sweat, of elbow grease, of thought, of intelligence, because agriculture is complicated, you have to anticipate the weather, all of that, hurry to bring in the harvest between two rains, well, even if it means asking the neighbors to come help, and vice versa. And as for the chapel, let's not even talk about it, there's all the work, manual and intellectual, there's nothing natural in any of that. So there, thanks to this text of Bastien's, to his question — he apologized last time for it being too long, no, I thank him — I come to my question: is it not possible to refound everything we call science, by unifying them through determinism? Thus we could distinguish the sciences of natural matter, governed by the effect-determination pairing, mechanical he says and not dialectical, from the sciences of historical matter, determined by the sign-meaning pairing, and no longer cause-effect, and he adds in parentheses
1:43:57 and he dares this formula, and I thank him for it, an eminently dialectical formula: free determination — it's as if I said "square circle." Apparently, from everything I've just said, either one is determined or one is free, and that's my conclusion, I'll stop there to give you the floor. Thanks to the one of whom Kant said — of whom Clouscard says he's part of the philosophy of the French Revolution, which begins with Rousseau — there he is, the one who had to be named, and which goes up to Lenin and his successors, if any remain — so from Rousseau to Clouscard, shall we say. And why do I bring up Rousseau to finish? Because Rousseau was the first to formulate this second determination, this free determination, when in Émile, to persuade the mother of his pupil that Émile must learn a manual trade in order to be freed — one never knows what might happen, a revolution and all that — and the duchess's son would find himself in a rather awkward position, look at the film The Servant, you'll tell me what you think, by Joseph Losey, a masterpiece — the son
1:45:09 will find himself in a rather awkward position if there's a revolution that strips him of all his possessions, if he hasn't learned to work, to make wealth bear fruit with his hands or his head or both — he will be the least free of beings, he who was the master in aristocratic society, the master of doing nothing. And so Rousseau says, to persuade the mother of his pupil, who is a duchess: everything men have made, men can destroy — there he's speaking of artifice, what men have made, because the tides, nature, the earthworm, worms, do an enormous amount of work, they make the earth loose and workable, all that, no — everything men have made, men can undo — I substitute "undo" for "destroy" — there's nothing indelible, therefore we cannot destroy anything but what nature has imprinted, unless one thinks that tomorrow bodies will fall according to a half g t², isn't it — there's nothing indelible, so the opposite of freedom, we cannot go against what nature has imprinted, and nature makes neither the rich
1:46:19 nor the prince, nor the great lord — a liberating phrase with which I conclude my talk this evening, because if the rich, the princes, the great lords are what men have made, no one can deny that, isn't it, that doesn't exist among the trees — the rich, the princes, the great lords — in that case they can be undone, and that's more or less the whole course of history. So let's clearly distinguish the determinism at work in what we call nature, which is in fact natural matter, and the laws of physics, which are thus laws of matter and which apply everywhere this matter remains natural, from another determinism that comes to add itself, not to increase man's servitude but on the contrary to push back his determination with regard to the laws of natural matter — because when I say to my table neighbor, please, help yourself first — often a female neighbor, by the way, otherwise I wouldn't say it, because I'm hungry at that moment — at that moment I'm making progress in a certain form of freedom that doesn't exist in the natural and animal order. There, are there any interventions, I turn
Questions on Proudhon and the Frankfurt School 1:47:30 to the control room and to Philippe — yes, so, very quickly, because I don't have much time, but that doesn't mean I'll rush it, because there's one — well, the first one requires time, I'll answer it more fully next time — but as for the second, on Proudhon, it's not that I'm dodging, but I tell you, listen, these problems are settled, we're not going back to the phalanstère of that antisemite Proudhon — because I see the questioner doesn't say it, either because he doesn't know it or because it's not very sayable, but that's not a sufficient argument to answer his question — but I recall that the relationship between Marxism and Proudhon's utopian socialism was developed by Marx in a little masterpiece called The Poverty of Philosophy, in response to Proudhon, who had written The Philosophy of Poverty — so let's read that book first, and then come back and ask me afterward, if there's still any need for me after that. There, that's the first question — remind me, it's the Frankfurt School — yes, that requires some development, it's a school in which there are those who refer to Marx, I'm thinking of Adorno, isn't it, people like that, or — but even
1:48:41 most of them — and we'll see, because my late comrade Michel Clouscard showed that, far from being Marxist — I'm not even talking about Marxian, but Marxist — it's actually a form of neo-Kantianism which is, in a way, more limited than Kantianism itself. That said, that doesn't stop me from having enormous admiration for a mind as subtle, cultivated, and vigorous as Adorno's, who wrote excellent things, for example on Heidegger, against Heidegger, and who has a very great knowledge of music, but who has a few little flaws, including in musicology — but we'll talk about that next time. There, thanks in any case to Bastien, thanks to the control room, and thanks above all to you for still being here, more than ever, and I remind you that next time — I'm telling you this for those waiting impatiently for it — we'll find again the giants, the gods, the dwarves, Siegfried, and soon we'll discover the Valkyrie, since that's the sequel
1:49:51 to Das Rheingold. There, until next time, see you next Wednesday.
