English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
"Listen to the scientists": environmentalism and mistrust of science 0:00 Good evening everyone. So I'm going to give you a little explanation about the setup, which is a bit different from what you usually see. We thought a lot about it with Adrien. We did some historical geopolitics and we came to the conclusion that if the Romans were so strong, conquered an empire, it's because they ate lying down, first of all.
0:39 Anyway, to live happily, not "let's live hidden," but let's live lying down. There you go. So, let me speak seriously now. Actually, I have a leg that hurts me a lot. To the point that I have trouble walking, I'll tell you more when I know more, but anyway I have medical appointments. And I'm in a state of misery that's not normal for someone past 80.
1:10 So, I don't want to waste too much of your time. It's just to explain why Adrien is kind enough to film me in a position where my leg doesn't hurt too much. There you go. If the cat will let me be, there we go. And today I'd like to go back a bit to the hard stuff, if you will, or the heavy stuff, as you often say, of philosophy.
1:40 That is to say, for example, to what Kant says about the reasons why, after centuries of groping around, all of a sudden, the discourse of what we today call the hard sciences became what we call scientific. Because in the generation, I say the generation, I mean yours, but anyway, among the people listening to me there are some very young people, there are people my age, that's rarer, but there are some.
2:11 Well, statistically speaking, most are between 25 and 35, statistically. And I notice that for this generation, and even more so for those who are younger, I say even more so because it's a tendency that's recent historically, and so those who are younger are even more steeped in the tendency I'm about to define, there are many misunderstandings regarding science in general.
2:48 Between extremes like the little Swedish girl, I say that without any sexism, because she's very young, what's her name, Greta Thunberg, I believe, that's it. You know, the champion of a certain ecology that isn't mine, you know, but there are worse things. When she says "listen to the scientists," what does she know about it? What does a physics teacher in a French high school today know—well, there, yes, I'm changing levels—who knows physics much better than she does, but what does he himself know about what's being discussed among the greatest scientists on the planet, no matter which region, the Nobel-worthy ones, if you will, you see, and when they discuss the Higgs boson or dark energy, or simply the Big Bang, you see, they're not always entirely in agreement across the board.
3:49 And there she is saying "listen to the scientists" as if it were English grammar, as if you just had to learn it by heart. No. I sense there's a common thread in several points of view within public opinion, within the doxa. It's not for the pleasure of speaking Greek, it's that it matters for relating certain terms to each other, giving them their name, their root.
4:22 You find that again in "paradox" for example. But there's a tendency—I often criticize environmentalism, you've been listening to me for a long time, I'm not going to insult you by having you discover today that I don't confuse environmentalism with true ecology, that is, a set of disciplines that aren't mine, so I won't pronounce on that, which are truly scientific, glaciology, astrophysics, meteorology, these are very serious disciplines, which have made enormous progress, and on which I won't pronounce judgment, I'm not talking about that.
5:03 You know, I never attack those disciplines, I attack environmentalist discourse. The kind that basically says man is bad, nature is good. I seem to be simplifying, caricaturing, but you know, that's pretty much the content when you dig a little. As you know, I lived in Africa for a long time. I saw air conditioning arrive, roughly in the sixties in Ivory Coast. You see?
5:34 In the United States, air conditioning, as they say there, has been customary since the 1920s-30s. Why am I talking about this as an example? First example of what? Let me remind you of my topic, which is starting to take shape tonight. It's a certain distrust of science, of technology, which you find in environmentalist discourse, not in true ecology, of course. Particularly in deep ecology, the one that says we absolutely need degrowth.
6:07 You've heard about that, I'm not inventing anything. There are prophets of degrowth, former socialist ministers, who have made themselves famous with that. Right? Including former French television hosts. You shouldn't joke about these things. They're not just clowns on the small screen. Don't forget that it's a guy who was a clown on the small screen, who acted in B-series, in westerns of such a low, incalculable level, so bad and repetitive, who gave us the President of the United States of America, the greatest power in the world, Reagan.
6:45 But yes, originally, he was a TV series actor. And when I say series, these aren't the series you watch, which have somewhat crafted scripts, no. You see, I saw them in Africa, because they're given as junk to developing countries like that. Yes. When they got off the airplane gangway, when they landed, they'd say "Hi." They're always Hollywood, those people.
7:18 Right? So, what am I talking about? I'm saying that there's a strange tendency, which is that the most developed humanity, the one that owes the most to, and benefits the most from, scientific progress and its technological applications—that's where you see the greatest number of anti-science discourses.
Lacan: every speech signifies for someone 7:51 That's strange. So, I'm going to quote Lacan, for once, this has happened to me before, but it's rather rare, but still, he has a phrase that I find one of the most fundamental of his, where he speaks neither of libido nor of the unconscious, well, not explicitly, but where he says: before signifying something, all speech signifies for someone.
8:27 And you know the importance that plays in the transmission I'm constantly trying to do. The efforts we must make to properly distinguish something and someone. That's a something. Adrien in front of me, that's a someone. You, whom I'm speaking to, that's a someone. But before—this phrase is crucial—before signifying, that is, making sense of, something, all speech signifies for someone. So, I've commented on something, someone, very quickly, but the most important word in the sentence is before.
9:03 He didn't say that the something doesn't count. If I tell you, pass me the salt, the thing counts, of course. I don't want you to pass me the sugar. But I'm speaking to someone when I say that. We are three. Me, who says, pass me the salt, the one to whom I say, pass me the salt, that makes two. And the salt itself, that makes three. This triangle that defines the symbolic field, where there's a relation between two subjects, but always in terms of an object, which is the same as between the tipis of Indian tribes, in the Wild West, for you, however you like, the American Wild West, passing the peace pipe, you see.
9:48 The peace pipe is a something, but it's passed to someone. It's made to be shared, like the joint, later, in the Sixties, in salons. I'm not talking about the working-class joint here. I'm talking about the fashionable joint, the one to which Clouscard devoted some very fine pages. The one that consists of getting connected, you know, I'm not talking about the one that has always existed, and that allows life to not just be this vale of tears, right?
10:22 I said that because, during the most severe economic crisis that what we call the West suffered before the one we're living through now, that is, the one of the 1930s, it's at that moment that alcohol prohibition was instituted. You see, there's a continuity in what I'm saying, I'm not constantly jumping from one thing to another, I'm constantly digging into the same problems. How could they dare tell the worker, not only are we going to put you out of work, 20 million unemployed in the United States, in 1929, well, in 1932, 20 million.
11:04 And over there, it doesn't forgive, there was no unemployment benefits, there wasn't much, there were a few soup kitchens for a fringe. 20 million unemployed, you won't have a job, your wife will leave you, and you won't go to the bar because there's no more alcohol. That's violence, those kinds of things. I'm not justifying drugs. I'm saying that the real is rational, and that if some people take drugs, there are reasons for it.
11:34 And if Marx had the intelligence to say about drugs, that religion is the opium of the people, I've already had occasion to say it, but it must be repeated. Sorry, I'm making a digression, it's not a detour. But Clouscard, whose mother was a schoolteacher, when they said to him, Michel, give us your methodology, you never talk about your method. My method is the one my good mother kept repeating.
12:06 The schoolteacher, when she said, you have to repeat, repeat, and repeat again, until it sinks in. Ah yes, that's not very Montessori, that's not very non-directive pedagogy, what I'm saying, it's not bobo. But those who dominate the world, they went through that. Well, those who dominate the world. Those who aren't spending their whole lives losing it in order to earn it, which is not the same thing.
12:39 No, no. It's like fine second homes. After having... which are... financed with money drawn from revolutions, sometimes from genocide. I'm making a second digression, but I would so love it if everywhere there's a big construction site... You know, when you see plaques. Right? General Council gave so much, funding so much, you know, construction of social housing, construction of a train station, whatever.
13:18 And when you see big construction sites, with signs, I'd like them to put up, for a magnificent villa, a palace, a luxury hotel, I'd like them to put up the origins of the fortunes behind them. Some people think that violence is those you see planting a bomb here, slitting someone's throat with a knife there. Of course, that's terrible, that's violent, and I condemn it. No, but the most violent are people who never do that, who are in an office and who trigger wars where there are millions of deaths.
13:51 They don't slit the throat of some poor passerby who had nothing to do with anything. No, they cause millions of deaths. You have to be wary of appearances. So, precisely, I'd like to end this introduction, apologizing in advance for my outfit, sorry for these fancy trousers, but it's what I've been able to bear since the heatwave, it's a bit better now and my leg tolerates it better.
The preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason 14:23 I'd like to read a text with you, dig into a text, which is nothing other than—I'll give you the reference—the preface to the second edition, since there were two prefaces, the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. And yes, there's philosophy before Kant and after Kant, that's interesting, isn't it?
15:01 Kant, well, let me nonetheless make a few very brief reminders, produces something of a summary, you know, a summary, the complete accounting of that century which has been nicknamed the Age of Enlightenment. So we're at the end of the 18th century, roughly, the latter part of the 18th, right? Kant, a thoroughly German philosopher, I say that because everyone knows, well everyone, it's well known in philosophy circles that Kant was someone who had an extremely regulated, extremely strict life, when I say German, that's it, it's a bit of a caricature, the Germans also have transgressive types, the hardest of all, though, I'll allow myself a few detours, because I see lots of comments saying people prefer these detours, so I'll indulge myself a bit more, but you know very well, for the smartest among you, that when I take detours, I'm always following the same course.
16:13 from the beginning, what am I alluding to? I'm saying that Germans are a bit strict, a bit—over there when you get fired, from a company, they remove your name from the door right away like in the United States, your name's no longer there, but it's within 24 hours, there's no... and you have to be on time when you have an appointment, a business appointment, but the Japanese are the same, I think I'm one of the rare ones among us, among you, in our community, to have hired a Japanese person when I was in Niger, right?
16:44 Because I wanted him to help me make sure that Nigerien musicians—that was one of the missions of our center—wouldn't get ripped off too much with publications, cassettes, of their compositions, on which they received no royalties because the cassette circulated without copyright in Niger, well anyway, so I had asked this young Japanese man to build me a recording studio so we could record in the center the productions of our students, some of whom now tour the world with their recitals, right?
17:23 And once, we had an appointment at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, while I was in Niger, but Niger isn't an important enough post for Japan, it's very important for the French, it's a former colony and all that, anyway, so there's an ambassador in Niger who has a regional function and also represents Japan for Burkina, Mali, Niger, so we had gone to see her solemnly, he had prepared the appointment for me and he told me, "Mr. Pagani, we need to be there 5 minutes early because with us, you can't be a second late," you see, you know all that, the Anglo-Saxons are a bit the same, the Germans, don't even mention it.
18:10 And why am I talking about this? For the exception, I told you, they're a bit very strict, but they're also extremely hardcore, let me explain, you see at the traffic light when you're about to cross in Berlin or Leipzig, you see young people, tattoos on the shoulder, hardcore stuff, from the shoulder down to the hands, from the neck to the ankles, with, what do you call it, 15 piercings on the ear, you see, but arriving at the light, even if there's no car for 2 km to the left and 2 km to the right, they wait for the green light.
18:50 There you go, I'm telling you that to show that they're still very much German, even those ones. Kant had that rather sober, very regulated side, that's what's best known in the anecdotes told about him, he took the same walk every day after working in a library where he had hung strings from the ceiling with handkerchiefs at the end so as not to waste time. Time is money, you know, rummaging through his pockets looking for his handkerchiefs, he had, you see, he was writing the Critique of Pure Reason, we'll read an excerpt, and he'd take a handkerchief, and then another, afterward, well, he took the same walk to within a meter every day, up to a certain point where he would turn around to come back, and only twice did he deviate from it.
19:45 It was July 15th, to be the first to see the newspapers announcing the storming of the Bastille. You see, I'm following my thread. That's to place him at the end of the 18th century, that is, the 1780s, the years of the French Revolution, right? And then, the second time, he transgressed to be the first to have a copy of Rousseau's Social Contract.
Epistemology and the confusion of matter with the sensible 20:20 Kant, the one who said that Rousseau was the Newton of morality. Let's go back—not to morality, to the philosophy of action, but to the philosophy of knowledge, to the philosophy of science. There you go, if you prefer to name it more precisely, science being called episteme among the Greeks, the philosophy of science is that very important part of philosophy which is epistemology. In this second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, or rather, this preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is a must—forgive me for speaking crudely to an audience—in the history of epistemology.
21:08 To understand it, I told you Lacan's phrase: before signifying something, the signifier signifies for someone, that applies to Kant's speech. He's addressing an audience, he's not addressing peasants, at the time he's addressing an audience of cultivated people, etc., the intellectuals of the time, those who were part of the vast movement of the Enlightenment, an essentially French movement, this time, and not German, essentially, even though it's a German, Kant, who provides the most grandiose accounting of it, undoubtedly the most rigorous, but he's addressing that Enlightenment spirit somewhat, yet in order to show within it their weak point.
21:57 Their weak point is bad empiricism. I'm telling you this beforehand, because otherwise there are passages we'd slide over without properly understanding what's at stake. Empiricism. Empeiria is simply experience. It's going around, you see, and you find that root, the going-around-of. Empeiria, empiricism, peripheral—but of course, you see it well, the tour, that's a perimeter, you see, that's empeiria.
22:28 Doing the experiment and going around the thing, there, in the laboratory, fine. Except that, for many people, an immense majority in fact, in public opinion, including even many Marxists among you, in my audience, and I'm delighted about that. Except that, it's not really getting closer to Marx to be a mechanistic empiricist. I mean, you shouldn't believe that matter is what I see and what I touch and what I feel.
23:00 Look, I touch this nightstand, my hand is stopped by something solid. Matter isn't solidity. All physicists know very well that there's incomparably more emptiness than solidity in it. That all of this is a mass of atoms, that you know, but you don't know what you know. That means there are atoms, yes, but the distance between the nucleus and the last electron, or between atoms, is an enormous distance in which there is emptiness.
23:34 Right? And how is it that my finger doesn't go through it? Well, because the atoms of my finger are bigger than those... well, those of the table are bigger than those of my finger. What do you want me to say? And then, empiricism, sense experience, if you will, one must not confuse matter. I'm not trying to fight materialism. On the contrary, I would even say, to understand, to get closer to true materialism which can only be scientific, one must beware of our tendency to confuse matter with the objects of the senses, that is, what philosophy since Plato has long called the sensible, the back of the cave.
Popper, Newton's apple, and the epistemological paradox 24:21 Ah, you're quoting an idealist. Ah, there you go. Well, well, well then. Oh yes. But the dominant ideology, it's been a long time since it was idealism. For a long time, it was religion that ran societies. Idealism reinforced, didn't it, the religious point of view. Now, the contemporary philosopher who is perhaps most widespread in the dominant ideology is Karl Popper. That is to say, he too, a philosopher of science, who says that Marx, Freud, all that, is worthless.
24:58 What matters is the non-falsifiability of our hypotheses. Sorry, falsifiability, on the contrary, of our hypotheses. They must be falsifiable. My propositions, my discourses, I'll summarize again what he says, I don't think I'm betraying it, as they say, my propositions must lend themselves to proofs, to experiments that can allow others to see that what I say isn't true. So, people say, oh wow, what a great invention.
25:29 How is an invention made? But we've agreed on this for 2500 years. If Euclid, or the people who gather around that name, since it was also a team, wasn't it? If Euclid, or someone a bit less well known, but Diophantus of Alexandria, who is one of the founders of analysis, if Al-Khwarizmi, and more generally the Arabs of the 13th and 14th centuries from Damascus to Baghdad, right?
26:08 Who practically invented algebra. You know that algebra is an Arabic word, like everything that starts with Al, whether it's the Alhambra or the almanac or the alcazar, it's an Arabic word, right? It means exactly a dislocated limb, you know, a dislocation, a part of my arm that has come out of its joint and needs to be put back. You see? Algebra, the member of an equation. You see? So, if all these people, since forever, know very well that you have to demonstrate, justify what you say to show it's true, you also have to know how to prove that the opposite is false.
26:50 There are, like that, famous reputations that rest on scams, I mean. I guarantee you that this philosopher is the object of a cult in the Anglo-Saxon world, for example, which happens to be the most empiricist world, as it happens. This isn't just a scientific quarrel I'm having, I'm not a scientist myself, by what right? No, it's that there's an enormous political stake here. It's that as long as I limit scientific truth to the world of objects, what's now called in your day the so-called hard sciences, because objects, it seems, are hard.
27:29 Well, I don't mind, but still, I also like gelatin when it's sweet, which is no less material than steel. The fact that the vast majority of public opinion confuses matter — against which I haven't said a word, let alone against materialism — with the sensible, believing that to have knowledge you just need well-sharpened senses. There are still people who believe Newton was asleep in a meadow somewhere in England, dozing, taking a nap, and was woken up by an apple falling and said to himself, well there it is, I've understood universal attraction — can you imagine that?
28:18 He waited to see an apple, and it's unbelievable what people tell — that's not how the history of science works. He had worked out the equations before seeing the apples fall, and even if that apple, the one he saw fall, inspired him with something — because there's always something true at the bottom of anecdotes — it had meaning for someone who had already done thousands of equations, and there we are no longer in empiricism, because if I tell you A equals B implies B equals A, there is nothing for the senses there, that can't be seen with the eye.
28:52 Leibniz used to walk his students through the park for his talks, his teaching, his transmission, and he would say to his students, men or women, boys or girls, he'd say: find me two identical leaves in the park. You've heard this, you know very well there aren't any — there is no equality in the real, in the truly mathematical sense. How is it that mathematics is a science that doesn't speak about the real, that it's through the detour of this science that we finally stopped saying nonsense about the real? That's strange, isn't it — it's called the epistemological paradox. How is it that those who staked the most on the eye to understand the world around us failed in antiquity — I'll come back to that in case some of you don't get it right away — and that on the contrary those who stopped looking and instead reasoned — you see the difference — looking is being a passive mirror into which light rays enter, I see the moon, I see the stars, that's what
Looking or reasoning: from the Chaldeans to Galileo and d'Alembert 30:02 the Chaldean astronomers of Mesopotamia did — they climbed what were called ziggurats, you know, towers — not the Tower of Babel, Babel, Babylon, the Babylons rise gigantic in the shadow of ruined Babel — they believed that by perching on a tower 30, 40, 50 meters high they would understand better what was happening in the galaxies — well, they didn't even know what was there, whether there were galaxies among the stars, you see. Whereas the one who founded — we'll talk about it in the Kant text I'm going to read you — Galileo, who practically founded modern physics, even though Copernicus had already made his revolution from geo — you see my absurd mistake — heliocentrism, Galileo insists in his works — I refer you here to Alexandre Koyré's admirable Galilean Studies, K O Y R E.
31:13 Alexandre Koyré, who is one of our greatest epistemologists of the 1950s-60s and who wrote the admirable Galilean Studies — well, he knows Galileo's texts well, he doesn't talk behind his back, and he shows that Galileo is not satisfied with his famous telescope, he doesn't content himself with seeing, he says: I'm not satisfied until I've found the mathematical equation that accounts for what I observe. And that's what we're going to try to illustrate here: how is it that discourse about the world around us only became scientific once we stopped being content to fix our senses on the world around us, like flies — because flies have fantastic eyes with a hundred facets, but that doesn't make them great physicists — how is it that it's when we made the detour, the detour through the mediation of what is apparently furthest from what we see every day, from what we bump into every day, namely mathematics
32:23 which is what's furthest from the world we bump into every day, isn't it? Seeing with the eye a polygon with 15,000 sides is no harder to conceive than a square, a regular polygon with 15,000 equal sides — you know that the more sides there are, the more the polygon tends toward the circle, which is its limit, right? Well, how does that work?
32:53 Well, that's what Kant was the first to understand, and, as it happens, at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, at the moment when this science was making fantastic advances — I'm thinking of the mathematics of our compatriot d'Alembert at the time — and I'll end my introduction to Kant, to the Kant text, with this allusion to d'Alembert. I recommend it, it's in a paperback, it costs nothing anyway, it's on Wikisource on the internet anyway — I recommend the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie. D'Alembert wrote the book that introduced the masterpiece of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, whose exact title is Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts — we shouldn't forget that — and I'm going to try to set myself up like this: so d'Alembert begins, and the perfect embodiment — that's why I'm talking about it to finish my introduction
34:04 to Kant, because it's what Kant refuted. D'Alembert begins with the most empiricist thesis there could be — well, he's not a philosopher, he's above all a mathematician, an immense mathematician, but he begins by saying: all our knowledge is divided into direct and reflected — at least that's clear. In philosophical language you might say: all our knowledge is divided into immediate knowledge — direct knowledge, there, I see the lamp there — and reflected — I see a photo of my lamp in a book, on a playlist. The direct ones — it's him speaking — the direct ones are those brought to us by the senses, at least that's clear, and the reflected ones are those we compose from what the senses bring us. So you see, everything begins with the senses — that's empiricism, the confusion, isn't it, of truth, of reality, and of the sensible, of the objects of the senses. One last example
35:15 that I'll take, right, when I want to illustrate immobility, I stamp my foot on the ground, I say: there, that's not the stars going by, that's not the TGV, that's the good solid ground, that's stillness, that's serious, it doesn't move. You know that what he's stamping on, like the rest of the planet, is moving around the sun at about 30 km per second, and since the objects are moving at the same speed we get the impression it's motionless — exactly like on a train: I can stand a coin on its edge, and if the train doesn't slow down or speed up, that is, most of the time, it stays on its edge — try the experiment, especially on a TGV, even if the train goes almost 1000 km/h like in China — yes, that exists now. So without further delay I'll read you this rather incredible preface. I begin — remember he is searching
From Egyptian surveyors to Euclid's axioms 36:25 for the question he's trying to answer: what is it that made each of these disciplines — mathematics, physics, in short the hard sciences — suddenly enter the sure path of a science, after having, for centuries, not been sciences but a series of gropings? He begins with mathematics, I'll read you the text: 'Mathematics, from the earliest times to which the history of human reason can reach back, followed among that admirable Greek people the sure road of science' — you see how precise Kant is — mathematics, from the earliest times, so even before the Greeks, that is, you all know that in Egypt, in Babylon, there were embryos of geometry, of arithmetic, not yet algebra — the Arabs would create algebra much later, a people of merchants, the Arabs, you know, if you owe me money we can say you owe me minus two hundred, you see, negative numbers appeared with debts, we'll come back to that another time, but it's interesting — in the desert
37:35 what do you want to do in the desert — I lived, well, I lived in countries where the desert is immense, I wonder if I ever came back from it — when you're there you understand that the three great religions of the absolute, the religions of transcendence, the three I cite in chronological order so as not to upset anyone — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all three appeared within a geographical handkerchief called the desert. What do you want to do in the desert? Salvation cannot come from nature, cannot be ecological — in the desert, salvation can only come from above, and that's what will make Christ of the Gospel say: my kingdom is not of this world. There, I mention that in passing. So he knows very well that there were embryos of calculation and all that, but there wasn't yet what we now call mathematics, that is, something that doesn't serve — not like in Egypt, which was formidable, that's not at all reductive
38:45 but doesn't serve merely a practical application — when the Nile had returned to its bed after its ravaging floods and each person's land had to be redistributed, restored, their plot given back — well, there we quickly realized we weren't going to measure each of the four sides of a square field, we quickly realized we could measure just one side, all we had to do was multiply by four to get the perimeter of the field, and even its area, you see — in other words, that was land surveying, and that's the origin of the word geometry — it doesn't mean the study of, it means measurement, metron, right, it's not geology, the study of the Earth, no, no, we stay on the surface of the Earth, we're not going vertically into depth, we do — you've already seen people walk, taking ten paces to roughly gauge the length of a room or a field, right — and that's how the first mathematical disciplines were born, in particular geometry, the measurement of the Earth. Well, only, it's only
39:55 starting from what stirs around the name of Euclid, roughly in the third, between the fourth and third century before Christ, a little after Socrates-Plato, but also in the wake — there was before Plato-Socrates, Pythagoras and Thales who had opened the ground — but it's the first time there's a systematic mathematics where one begins with so-called primary notions, definitions, you see — axiom, definition, postulate, there — that is, things on which everyone can only agree. Too bad you're not present and we're in the virtual rather than face to face, because otherwise I would have asked you questions, I would have given you the following propositions and asked which seems most certain, most sure — listen carefully — tomorrow it will be daylight; the whole is greater than the part; if A equals B then B equals A. I'll stop at these three — which is the surest? I can't ask you to answer, so I'll have to carry on myself. I can tell you anyway
41:05 so we can do the exercise together, that each time I'm told either 'tomorrow it will be daylight' or 'the whole is greater than the part,' that's true, I see no exception — a car is always bigger than one of its headlights, a house is always bigger than one of its windows — that's not possible, right? Ah, 'tomorrow it will be daylight' — go tell that to a Lapp or a Norwegian, otherwise for six months it will be daylight! But yes, the whole is greater than the part — how many whole numbers are there? Good students that you are will answer: there's an infinity, sir, very good. How many even numbers are there — I take a part of the whole numbers — how many are there? Why yes, an infinity too — here the part equals the whole. What do you want me to say — as soon as we're dealing with transfinite sets... Or I could give you even more examples, I know you like it even though it's irritating: all bodies have weight.
42:15 it's true that even imperceptible weights for us — our hand — but still, on scales that only exist in a laboratory, with ten-millionths of a gram, every body that exists, existed, did have weight. Ah, right? So you don't know Captain Haddock, you haven't read Explorers on the Moon? You know very well that — without even going far — when you're in space, in a space station 100 km above our heads, right, the captain wants to have his whisky on the sly, you know, while the others sleep in the capsule, and his whisky, you remember it all — it doesn't fall, it has no weight, it floats. No, not all bodies have weight — it's even the opposite, the general rule is that bodies have no weight. I don't know, it's only close to the Earth that the mass of the Earth attracts you, me, him, toward its center — it's here that there is this attraction we call G for short.
43:26 one half of G T squared — well in physics we say one half gamma T squared, right, to generalize so that it applies in every direction, not just toward the center of the Earth — and so we correct: no, not all bodies have weight; on the other hand, it is true that all bodies have mass — yes, that's — and then afterward we run into problems: does the photon have mass? OK, I'll stop there, not only because it takes us a bit away from our Kant text but especially because I probably don't have the competence to go further. So, I resume and continue: 'Mathematics, from the earliest times to which the history of human reason can reach back, in the Orient, followed among that admirable Greek people, Euclid, the sure road of science' — but we mustn't believe, this is Kant, that it was as easy for mathematics as for logic — where reason has to deal only with itself, in other words we're not in applied mathematics — to find this royal road
"The effect of a revolution": the origin of the word and its transmission 44:36 it's not easy, that's why he asks the question: how could we suddenly move from doxa, from the depths of the cave, from somewhat contingent chatter about opinion, where truth and falsehood are mixed and you no longer know where you stand, to science — 'where reason has to deal only with itself,' to find this royal road, or rather to blaze it for itself. I believe rather that they long did nothing but grope about, especially among the Egyptians, and that this change was the effect — the word is underlined — of a revolution. I advise you, when you see words we use often, every day, especially in politics, to try to see where they come from, what their homeland is, the land from which we imported them — does it come from the technological world, from agriculture? Revolution comes from astronomy, the revolution of the moon around the earth — what is above passes below, what is below rises above — the revolution of the heavenly bodies, you see, we'll come back to it — and that this change, then, which meant that the gropings
45:47 originally in mathematics became — how does he put it — a royal road — this change was the effect of a revolution, the word is underlined, in italics, brought about by a single man who conceived the happy idea of an experiment after which there was no longer room for error. He didn't say — Euclid, there's nothing more to say after Euclid in mathematics, as if it were the last word — no, but afterward we're sure of knowing which direction to walk in now, you see — 'there was no longer room for error' on the road, you see, to follow, and the sure path of science was opened and marked out for all time and for infinite distances. The history of this intellectual revolution, and of the man who had the good fortune to accomplish it, has not come down to us — we don't have the details of what Euclid did, not everything has reached us — and yet this revolution was much more important than the discovery of the route by the famous cape — he's alluding here, it's the era of the great navigators who would discover Oceania, Australia — the Bougainvilles in France, the Cooks
46:57 in England — and the cape is of course the Cape of Good Hope, the route around the cape to sail around Africa and reach the riches and spices, right, of Asia. However, the tradition transmitted to us by Diogenes Laërtius — so he cites a chronicler of antiquity — in naming the supposed inventor, it's of course Euclid, of the simplest elements — that's the title, Elements of Geometry by Euclid — the simplest elements of geometry, elements which, according to common opinion, the opposite of scientific opinion, need no proof — this tradition proves that the memory of the change brought about by the first step taken on this newly discovered road must have appeared extremely important to mathematicians, and that's why it was saved from oblivion. It's interesting
48:07 what Kant says — it was kept for 600 [years], while most manuscripts of the time are just dust, right, indecipherable. That reminds me of Plato, you know — I sometimes cite Plato's Seventh Letter, I cite it each time to show the relationship between philosophy and politics, right from the very birth of the first great system of written philosophy that has not come down to us — Plato's — I'm not talking about one of his dialogues, I'm talking about one of his letters, of his letters — we have correspondence, letters that go back that far in antiquity, to the fifth century BC — and well, that's exactly what Kant says: we've lost almost everything, except, for example, the pre-Socratics, the Heraclituses, everything that inspires, you know, the gurus, the Heideggers and company, you know, who base themselves on Parmenides, on Heraclitus — we have practically no — what am I saying, no complete book — what am I saying — no complete chapter — we have a few fragments quoted much later in Aristotle, as he says, in Diogenes Laërtius
49:17 and even Plato, who quotes Empedocles — what am I saying — Anaxagoras, sorry, in the Phaedo, all that — but Plato had such prestige even in his own time, there was such a cult, such admiration, that fortunately for us there were many copies made of these tablets, these manuscripts, so that out of thousands of copies a few have come down to us. There — that's not the center of our problem, so I move on — 'and that's why it was saved from oblivion. The first who demonstrated the isosceles triangle, whether he was called Thales or by any other name,' says Kant, 'was struck by a great light' — you see this critique of empiricism — it's not with the eye, he didn't have a more highly trained optical and visual system than anyone else — well no, it was cogitating in his head — 'for he found that he ought not to attend to'
Thales, the a priori, and the construction of the triangle 50:28 'that he ought not to attend to what he saw in the figure, or even to the mere concept of it, but that he had only to bring out, by thought, what he himself had put into it, and had constructed a priori' — one of Kant's key words, right, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the title of this enormous work which means that philosophy will never be the same again, before and after — you can think what you want of the work, but in any case no one had said what I just said. 'Pure' means exactly the same as 'a priori,' it means independent of sensible experience, and you see, when he says he ought not — Thales — he ought not to attend to what he saw in the figure, I can't help but think, not of the preface, but of a passage within the Critique of Pure Reason itself, a crucial passage that I recommend, even to those who think they know Kant, that they reread it if they've already read it, and dig into this extraordinary passage where Kant insists
51:38 on the essential thing that separates philosophy from mathematics and, more generally, from the hard sciences — he himself being a philosopher, right, and having followed the scientific work of his time very closely, he even made remarkable advances in astronomy, Kant on the solar system. Well, he says this: as a difference, philosophy proceeds by concept — we don't open our eyes, we're not in metaphysics — the concept, the concept of lamp, the concept of computer, the concept of keyboard, the concept of mouse, the concept of nightstand, the concept of a philosophy workshop — there, philosophy proceeds by concept, mathematics proceeds by construction. The concept of concept — there I'm getting you a bit into Kant, this isn't just a preface, we're entering the body of the work — what a work, Kant, what a work! And he says
52:49 he's not going to leave us like that with this difference that seems like a play on words — to construct a concept is to represent it a priori in pure intuition. So I'll use this example, you have to work a bit, sorry, you have to be a bit abstract, but you won't regret it. He says, to make us understand: give a philosopher a triangle — go ahead, take a triangle and throw it at a philosopher's feet and tell him, from everything he knows about this triangle — he knows what a triangle is, he has the definition — tell him to deduce from everything he knows about this triangle, namely, I know it has three angles, it has three sides, you see there's a space enclosed by its sides — tell him to deduce from that that the sum of these angles makes 180 degrees. He's incapable of it, as long as he stays within strict philosophy. Give it to a geometer, to a mathematician — he won't stay stuck on the triangle turning it over in every direction, he'll construct the concept of the triangle, namely he'll extend
53:59 you know, the demonstration — I'd need some blank paper around here, I wonder if there isn't some folded up near you — no, wait, I think on the left there's some on the shelf below — ah, very good, yes, yes, thank you, that should be enough, very good, there, there. So what is this, a piece of — oh, we don't care — no, no, that's not right, no, no, it's a text by Aymeric Monville anyway, but I represented it much better elsewhere and on my computer, so I could — I'm glad — I gave a start, and, girls, one moment please, excuse me, I'm ill, so I'm saying a bit of nonsense — there, you see, there's my triangle, I'll try not to make it too — there, any old triangle, I'm making it any shape, I made it almost equilateral but never mind, all right. So Kant says: the mathematician doesn't stay in the concept, he goes out of it, he extends one side — we're in Kant's time — he extends one side, the other
55:09 there, he constructs opposite a line parallel to the base — there, I'll put letters A B C anyway, there, sorry, I'm a very bad draftsman, you can tell — well, look carefully — there's the triangle, there's the line the mathematician brings in — the philosopher didn't do that, that's not — or if he does it, it's because he knows mathematics, and so it amounts to the same thing for the demonstration. There, I extend the sides here, this one and that one, and that gives me here three angles whose sum, 1, 2, 3, is indeed a right angle, is indeed 180 degrees, a straight line — so you see, after that, it's enough — you see this angle here equals that one there, by alternate interior angles, as we say — and it's done. So it's because he went outside the triangle, and how could he do that? Because he doesn't have only
56:20 like the philosopher who proceeds only by concept — he doesn't just have the concept of triangle, he has, look carefully, he has the space all around the triangle where he can do all sorts of things, extend sides, you see — he has space, space wasn't provided for in the concept of triangle, only a small space among the three sides was provided for, but space in general as an a priori form of sensibility, as Kant says, what Kant calls pure intuition — and yes, intuition, sorry, I forgot to tell you, it doesn't have its ordinary meaning at all, it's not my grandmother saying 'I have a feeling they'll get married soon,' no, no, that's not it, or 'I had a dream and I have a feeling she's going to die,' no, no, that's not it — intuition really comes from intueri, a Latin verb — it's everything to do with the senses, precisely, it's vision, for example, right — so you see, most intuitions are empirical, I see this lamp, I see a yellow color, I see a green color, I hear a sound, all that is intuition, auditory, olfactory, by smell
Pure intuition: space and time 57:31 visual, etc. But Kant invented pure intuition, that is, things that are not concepts — there are two of them, space and time, which are thus the frameworks without which we would be unable to grasp the external world. Everything we know about the external world occupies a certain space, even if it's a billionth of a micron — and a micron is already, I believe, a ten-millionth of a millimeter, I think, and I'm not sure — occupies a space, and every thing in phenomena also occupies a certain duration, even if it's a billionth of a second. We recently demonstrated the famous Higgs boson, without which all of today's physics would collapse — in recent years we proved the theory was coherent by demonstrating it experimentally, with the great accelerators, particularly in Geneva, we demonstrated it — but don't think we're there contemplating it, it lasted — we have a trace
58:41 a trace, a wake, of something that existed for I don't know what infinitesimal fraction of a second. So all that is to show you the immense work behind each of the sentences of this preface — a preface which is always written afterward, once the book is finished. 'The first who demonstrated the isosceles triangle, whether he was called Thales' — you'll see how much clearer it is now — 'or by any other name, was struck by a great light, for he found that he ought not to attend to what he saw in the figure' — you see, I want to put it back in front of you, inside the triangle there, you see, in the figure — 'or even to the mere concept of it' — I have three angles, I have three sides, that I have in the concept of triangle, fine — 'but that he had only to bring out, by thought, what he himself had put into it, and had constructed a priori' — that is, independently of experience, I'm drawing the parallel — it's not experience that told me, hey, draw this parallel — it's because I know
59:52 where I'm going to end up, which is at the sum of the three angles and then equating those angles with those of the triangle — 'for he ought not to attend to what he saw in the figure, or even to the mere concept of it, but that he had only to bring out, by thought, what he himself had put into it, and had constructed a priori' — I remind you that a priori means before coming — and coming before the tribunal of experience — Kant never said that we should do without experience, and that in order to know — well, as for this relation to experience, there's a sentence in the Critique of Pure Reason that is crucial, and I'll tell you, it's very short and very clear: 'If it is true that all our knowledge begins with experience' — and 'with' is underlined graphically, in italics — 'if it is true that all our knowledge begins with experience' — you see Kant doesn't take experience lightly — 'that does not mean that it all arises out of experience,' and that in order to know for certain
The order of appearance of the sciences, from mathematics to history 1:01:02 'a thing a priori, he ought to attribute to that thing only what' — listen carefully — 'followed necessarily from what he had himself put into it, according to the concept he had formed of it' — sorry, 'according to the concept he had formed of it' — physics. Well, that's for mathematics. Physics — how did physics manage to become a science? Of course, historically, everyone knows this is what's called the scientific revolution, which runs from Galileo, culminating in Newton, and continuing after Newton until it's extended even further — not refuted afterward but shown to be capable of going even further with the theory of relativity, with Einstein, and with quanta of course. So physics arrived much more slowly at finding the great road of science — how much time separates the appearance of Euclid's Elements in the 5th century, or the 3rd or 4th, before Christ, from the works of Galileo? Fifteen centuries. I'll come back
1:02:14 to the time it takes each time science gets closer to the concrete — that is, the most concrete thing is ourselves, isn't it? Let's not — no, I won't put it off, look how important this is — a list of the sciences in order of historical appearance: mathematics first, so roughly the 3rd or 4th century BC, then physics — well, you have to wait fifteen centuries — then chemistry, you have to wait for Lavoisier, 18th century, already faster, we went from the 16th to the 18th, only two centuries were needed — then biology with Claude Bernard the following century, in the 19th — yes or no, the one who founded biology said this, I'm sorry for the ecologists but what can you do, science is being thrown in my face — so I quote a scientist who founded nothing less than biology and who used to say: the living is the dead, there's no difference
1:03:27 in nature between physics, chemistry, biology. Well, I'll continue — if we keep going like this it's over for the so-called natural sciences, the list is finished. After that there are countries, continents — within the mathematical continent there's topology, number theory, linear algebra, I don't know, after that I get lost. Physics — can you imagine, there's surface physics, solid-state physics, well, whatever you like, fluid theories, same for chemistry, for biology — that's the end for the natural sciences. But yes, but we can still push the scientific further, beyond nature, to man, and there we arrive at psychology, sociology, history — yes or no, the so-called human or social sciences — there are those who still argue and think they're on the left when they say it's not the human sciences, it's the social sciences, how ridiculous — I would call them the sciences of history, maybe, people will find that ridiculous — well, I have Marx on my side, one could find better, for now I'll leave it there because I've never
1:04:37 seen physics, psychology, or sociology unfold outside of a history — you see, ever since man has existed — I even include in history, in the broad sense, prehistory, from the very first knapped flints, right — we leave the natural world for the world of — it's not me saying it, it's the artificial tongue — a hammer is no less material, right, than a mango falling from a tree, right, but a hammer isn't natural — it's supernatural, or at least it's artificial, if you don't want there to be a value judgment with the 'super' — let's go, let's refine this, and we're right to, because these are the big stakes. So physics, I resume, I continue — 'arrived much more slowly at finding the great road of science, for it is little more than a century and a half' — that was recent for the time, that was recent —
Reason perceives only what it itself produces 1:05:47 'that a great mind, Bacon of Verulam, in England, partly occasioned and, since some were already on its track, partly stimulated this discovery, which can only be explained by a sudden revolution' — you see, it's like earlier with Euclid, after a slow evolution of gropings there's suddenly a revolution which means that, that's it, now we're in science and not in doxa, opinion, in epistēmē and not in doxa, if you want to speak Greek and show off — 'a sudden revolution in the way of thinking. I here consider physics only' — listen to this sentence carefully — 'so far as it is founded on empirical principles' — that's what he's going to criticize, and that's the case with the Anglo-Saxons, you know that an English proverb, well, a very famous English saying, is the one that says the proof of the pudding — finish my sentence — is in the eating, yes, you know it, right — to which Althusser retorts — it's rare, isn't it, that I quote Althusser approvingly, but still, one must be fair — when he says: yes, but the problem is knowing whether what I'm eating really is pudding and not an elephant cooked in a bain-marie. Think about that a little
1:06:58 about this counter-argument of Althusser's, which isn't so silly. So, when — and here we're getting to the heart of the matter regarding physics — 'when Galileo,' and this is in italics, 'caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane,' or, sorry — this passage is a highlight, if you're to forget everything else, remember the passage that begins here — 'when Galileo,' it's on page 22 of the reference we'll give in the link, that is, of the translation on Wikisource of the Critique of Pure Reason, page 22 — 'when Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane' — so you see, he could say in advance, he already knew the weight of the balls — 'or when Torricelli,' another Italian, you'll notice, Italy was the Silicon Valley of the time, it was the cutting edge of European science at the time — 'made the air carry a weight which he had previously determined,' he worked a lot on pressure, Torricelli made the air carry a weight he knew
1:08:09 to be equal to that of a known column of water, known in advance, that is, before the experiment — 'or when, at a later time, Stahl,' a German, 'changed metals into oxide, and oxide back into metal, by withdrawing something and then restoring it' — we're closer to chemistry there — 'a light broke upon all natural philosophers.' They saw — sorry, they understood — that reason — I'll say it slowly because it's perhaps the most important sentence, one of the most important in the whole history of the philosophy of science — 'that reason only perceives that which it produces after a plan of its own' — there, we need to pause on this a little. Reason only perceives, only grasps, what it produces itself — whereas the empiricists believe reason is a mirror, but an empty one — you know that if there's nothing in front of the mirror — and there I agree with the empiricists, I'm not crazy — if there's nothing in front of the mirror, there's nothing in the mirror, and so if there is something in the mirror, that's — that's the empiricists' view — if there's something in front. So if we
1:09:19 as a subject, if the subject of knowledge, the subject of science, the scientist's ego, is to be a mirror that is empty until experience comes to fertilize it — a bit like the woman, and yes I did say fertilize, you think I'm joking? Plato and Aristotle, I know they're Mediterraneans, so a bit macho, but still, when they build the theory of the khôra, it's complicated, so I won't dwell on it — it means the place, the location. What is it that makes this keyboard have its place? Look, I remove it — what has become of the place? What is that? That got Plato and Aristotle thinking, all right, and they say it's so complicated that the place is like the woman who refuses to let herself be fertilized by the man, who refuses to let herself be penetrated by knowledge. It's incredible — when I say fertilize, I'm not choosing my words at random. Anyway, the empiricist naively believes that our mind is empty until there's something in front of it — the subject leaves itself out of account.
1:10:29 that's the big flaw of empiricism, whereas philosophy began with what Socrates recalls in Plato's Apology of Socrates — the phrase inscribed on the pediment of the temple at Delphi, the most sacred place in Greece, where the oracle says to whoever comes to consult it: know thyself. It's good to know about the stars, about life — fortunately I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for medicine, I'd add biology — careful, I'm not saying a word against science, I'm saying a word against the ideology that would reduce knowledge to external objects. There cannot fail to be knowledge of what the inside is. So maybe I have things to hide — ah, there I want to intervene on something else, a negative element: it's not emptiness that's there, there's an overflow, all right — private property, no trespassing. I said earlier — I know there are still a few who think of themselves as Marxists and who are going to tell me I'm making concessions to idealism.
Neopositivism and Auguste Comte's law of three stages 1:11:39 when I say that idealism is less ideological — I didn't say it isn't, but that it is much less so — now, the word I would give to today's dominant ideology in the field of knowledge, I'm talking about, is neopositivism, that is, precisely limiting knowledge to the hard sciences. That is — I haven't said a word against the hard sciences, I'm speaking against discourses that would limit our investigation and our research to the field of stars, planets, the cells of our body, enzymes, brain imaging — and love, you know what that is, it's pheromones: when you're close to a woman she gives off certain things, and me too. Ah, but come now — we don't need novelists to refine that, in my opinion. We learn much more about love in The Princess of Clèves, don't you think, than in all the cognitivism of those disciplines, which fortunately is starting to be called into question — it was about time. But there you have it, today's dominant ideology is neopositivism. I have respect for the positivism of Auguste Comte — it took daring at the time to state the law of the three stages.
1:12:51 we're working today on the law of the three stages — this evening, sorry. Humanity goes through three stages for Auguste Comte: first the religious age, then the metaphysical age which succeeds it, and the positive age, which is the one during which Auguste Comte is writing and which is roughly the one consecrated by the hard sciences. So let's move quickly — the religious age first, that is, the age where everything depends on a divinity that has proper names — proper names: Shiva, Shinto, Jehovah, Allah, not to mention all the others — and I'm not even talking about the spirits that swarm, the proper names that swarm in animist religions. I really like the story of the bori in Niger. In Niger, it happens that people have crises of trance, of possession, and for them, for the Nigeriens — and not only the Nigeriens but the peoples of the Sahel — this crisis of possession simply means
1:14:01 that one is being ridden by a spirit, by a divinity, and these divinities are enumerated as such — the divinity of the storm is called Dongo, and even among the divinities there's a Capolani — yes, a Corsican name, but who would believe it — it's because there must have been an administrator who astonished them, or traumatized them, or dazzled them, I don't know. Yes, in the pantheon of my Nigerien brothers there are even Corsican administrators or foremen, I don't know, in any case proper names of French expatriates. And so that's the religious age, where everything is explained by the activity of these divinities. Then there's the metaphysical age, the age where everything is explained by principles that are no longer proper names of God but abstract principles like the One, the Many, Being, Becoming — I remind you that all the pre-Socratics can be lined up under this category.
1:15:11 for Parmenides what is essential is Being, and his key phrase is: what is, is, and what is not, is not. When I used this phrase with my students, the Africans burst out laughing — sir, you don't need to be a great intellectual to come up with that — because you don't immediately understand that this phrase, which almost seems to be what's called a tautology, that you didn't need to be Parmenides to know it — he's actually in the process of discovering what in logic, in mathematics, is called the principle of the excluded middle. This is a keyboard or it is not a keyboard — the third option is excluded, there's no third thing, there's no 'my friend, I'll give you a good price' — no, we're not in commerce here, we're in science. What is, what is not — good, Being for Parmenides, the atom for Democritus — it takes extraordinary daring to say each time there's a principle, secular this time, no longer divinities, a principle, and a quotation that sums it all up, for Democritus, who has enormous importance in the history of materialism — imagine, he's the first great one — nothing exists but the atom and the void, yes
1:16:21 because if there were no void, the atoms couldn't move, they couldn't form combinations. Nothing exists but the atom and the void, and everything else is opinion. Can you imagine the daring of that — meaning cardboard, excrement, gold, love, God, all of that is combinations of atoms — that took some nerve. Then there's Heraclitus — the principle isn't Being, on the contrary, it's Becoming: you never bathe twice in the same river. Try bathing twice in the same river, you'll see that the water you bathe in the second time isn't the same as the water that flowed the first time — it's already gone toward the sea, you see. Him, it's Becoming, all right. For Pythagoras it's number that governs everything — all is number — and in his head, he wasn't starting to speculate, he wasn't a computer scientist, but still, all is number. At the time it was only the natural whole numbers, and not even with zero — it was N-plus, I believe that's what it's called in mathematics — set theory in particular. But that was already enormous. All is number, indeed.
1:17:31 can you imagine the applications, today, whether digital technology or a Beethoven quartet, or the photo of a beautiful landscape — all of that can reach our ears or our eyes through screens, through speakers, starting from discrete numbers. You see, there's something that explains everything — all is number, nothing exists but the atom and the void and everything else is opinion — you see, that still retains a bit of religious authority. And then he says, after that, the third stage, that of the modern world, of our world if you like — that's what Auguste Comte calls the positive age. That happens in the middle of the 19th century — first third, middle of the 19th century, or thereabouts — which is characterized
1:18:42 by the fact that we stop searching for first causes and final causes — where do we come from, where are we going — the questions in which most people are still struggling, in discussions, about first causes and final causes — in order to know what lies between the two, which is already quite something. Voltaire had already said, in the Age of Enlightenment, that we must cultivate our garden — that's not bad. You know I lean toward Rousseau, and that the two of them couldn't stand each other, so to speak — not Voltaire and Rousseau, but well, good old Voltaire, that's still him — he's fed up with fanaticism, with wanting to impose the absolute. There you have it, that's positivism — I have respect for it, it's great thinking, all right, a bit positivist for sure. What's certain is that Auguste Comte never suspects that the subject is split within itself — and here I come back to Kant, to the depth of Kant, who nevertheless comes before him, in the 18th century. Yes, we do need to talk a bit about the unconscious there — Auguste Comte, that never occurs to him. The mathematician
The unconscious, politics, and the progression toward man 1:19:52 is the very opposite of the unconscious, it's reason wide awake — physicists too — but unconscious, for Freud, I won't insist, it's obvious. But some people believe it was Freud who invented the concept of the unconscious, which he did give a considerable extension, and which he applied above all to what was not the object of the list I made — mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology — we stopped, you'll have noticed, at the human sciences. Strictly speaking, this list should conclude with which discipline — the one which, if it were a science, would solve problems well and cause less bloodshed? You can't guess? But yes — some of you have guessed, I can hear you thinking — it's politics. If politics could be reduced to equations, there would be no point arguing, there would be no world wars. As Aristotle says: mathematics unites men, politics divides them. So there you have it — if you look at this progression, from mathematics — I repeat myself — in the 4th century BC, up to today, the disorder
1:21:04 that the human and social sciences are in, never mind — is it a coincidence that this progression has a direction, that is, that it draws closer to us? In mathematics we have, in a way, the science of everything and nothing, but the most universal one — all right, if A equals B and B equals A, you can say Peter is Paul's brother, therefore Paul is Peter's brother; you can apply it — if A is before B and B is before C, then A is before C, that's called transitivity, I believe, in set-theoretic logic. But in that case it's the abstract world. And then with physics — there, for the first time, we touch the real, it's not only in my head anymore, now we're talking about the sun, the stars, falling bodies, rising waters, pressure — well, there, already it draws closer to us because we are in the concrete world, the real world. And then chemistry, and then biology — biology, there we reach living beings — well now, that's not the rule
1:22:14 in the universe, but there, on the other hand, we're not far from man in biology, even if biology also includes the earthworm and the bacillus of that filthy disease called malaria, which remains the leading cause of death in the world. Sorry to my environmentalist friends, but I do want to point out that the greatest cause of death in the world is a mosquito called the anopheles — its female, moreover, too bad for bourgeois feminists, though women doctors know this even better than I do — a female anopheles mosquito that lays its eggs, that needs our blood to lay its eggs, and I guarantee you it's absolutely organic, this mosquito, it comes out of no factory — it comes from marshy swamps, paludes in Latin, that's where the word 'paludism' [malaria] comes from, because the ancients believed it was the fumes coming from the marshes that caused the disease and the fever — malaria, word for word, bad air, mal-aria, there you go. So you see, there is a direction that moves toward man, like an asymptote
1:23:24 but man is still far from being the object of a science, even if it's making progress — and fortunately it makes progress every day, otherwise I wouldn't even be alive. So this progress concerns my body and biology, doesn't it, our bodies. So I made this long digression to show that every day we talk about science in the media, etc.
The prism and Marx's Tätigkeit of the subject 1:23:56 we're far from seeing closely, as Kant does, what it presupposes, aren't we. I wanted to read — I'll practically finish, well, I'll conclude this development anyway because it's crucial. I'll pick up the beginning and carry it through to the end: when Galileo made balls roll down an inclined plane, whose weight he had himself determined in advance, or when Torricelli made the air bear a weight that he knew to be equal to that of a column of water known in advance, or when later Stahl transformed metals into calx and this in turn back into metal by removing or adding certain elements — then a new light dawned on all physicists — in other translations, you know, it was a revelation for all physicists — namely that reason perceives only what it itself produces. So let me make one last aside before continuing this text to the end: that reason itself produces — that means that reason is no longer this passive, empty mirror, it is a little factory
1:25:06 that produces, and if we want to stay with optical metaphors, like the mirror, let's stay with it, but it's no longer the mirror, it's the prism that we need to think of, that's our reason — it's a bit like what a prism does. You know what a prism is — light enters it, light from outside, white light, isn't it, and when it comes out, it's a shimmer of colors. Something has happened inside — inside the subject, I suppose. Here the prism is the metaphor for what I meant — you understand that the subject is what is active. And I say to those who accuse me of idealism, or who think that when they're idealists — I don't know, that can be debated — he doesn't decide, some say that's the advantage of idealism, he doesn't take sides. I'm not settling that for now. What I'm telling you is that Marx, whom one can hardly accuse of idealism, does the same work as Kant, the Kant I just read, in the Theses on Feuerbach, when he says — I believe it's the second thesis, when he says, it's very short
1:26:17 I refer you to the Theses on Feuerbach, they're all online, where he says that it is entirely to the credit of German idealism to have insisted on the Tätigkeit of the subject — sorry to say it in German, I sound like I'm doing Heidegger, but it's translated as the activity of the subject. A subject is not merely someone who wants to know, it's someone who has desires, who has ends, who pursues goals, who has dark designs or sublime designs, whichever — that's what a subject is.
