English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Hegel on vacation: Gracq's Le Château d'Argol 0:23 Precisely to introduce this aspect, in general, Hegel is associated more with what he himself calls the Anstrengung des Begriffs, that is, the constraining effort of the concept. And here I am talking to you about vacations, which seems a bit out of place. And that's why I'm going to introduce my talk with a quotation, an excerpt from a novel, from a novelist.
0:55 It's about Julien Gracq and one of his first novels, The Castle of Argol, which some of you know and others don't, which had been submitted to Gallimard and then refused. That was the usual thing at Gallimard. Gallimard had refused Proust and Gracq. And now Gallimard made a fortune with Proust. And so his hero, the hero of Gracq's novel, for those who remember it, and for those who haven't read it, this is the occasion — I'll invite you to read it, it's really beautiful. His hero finds himself in his manor in Brittany and there, he brings some books.
1:30 He brings Hegel. So, this is the passage I'm going to read to you. "It was above all, as we have seen, to philosophical research that his mind had first applied itself. At twenty, setting aside any consideration of success or career, he had set himself the task of the realm of the enigmas of the world of the senses and of thought. He read Kant, Leibniz, Plato, Descartes. But the natural bent of his tastes pushed him toward more concrete philosophies, some dared say more courageous ones, which, taking hold of the world bodily and generously, and not content to let the ray of particular lights penetrate it, demanded of it its truth, its total explanation, by enumerating its component parts, like Aristotle, like Plotinus, like Spinoza."
2:09 "But above all, he had developed a passionate curiosity for the prince of the geniuses of philosophy, Hegel, that king of architecture and of the science of ensembles, that one who dethroned all abstract knowledge from its glory, for whom the most brilliant philosophical systems are but the nebulae from which he composes his gigantic Milky Way. He had come to devote an energetic predilection to him. He held dialectic to be that lever demanded in derision by Archimedes, which would lift the world. And he brought Hegel to his solitary manor in Brittany to fill overabundantly the days he foresaw would be dreary and arid in a melancholy land."
A novel of formation where poetry and philosophy meet 2:40 There you have it. It's in this spirit, in this state of mind, that I would like to talk with you about, for example, Hegel on vacation. And if we decided, in consultation with Dominique Mazoui, to focus this talk, among all of Hegel's works, on the Phenomenology of Spirit, it's because it is undoubtedly — all commentators agree on this — one of the most fascinating works in the history of thought, one that even today we wonder what genre to classify it under.
3:20 Is it really a work of philosophy? Is it a Bildroman, as they say in Germany, that is, a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation, somewhat like Rousseau's Emile, which served as a model at the time? And you'll see that in the Phenomenology this plays a large role, this didactic side — not in the ex cathedra sense, of course, but as Hegel himself says very well, in a passage we'll have the occasion to return to, in his preface, where he says that he has tried, and this is what this work does, to bring philosophical consciousness down to common consciousness, that is, to all of us, to opinion, and inversely, to raise common consciousness up to philosophical consciousness.
3:57 This double movement, which makes up the whole interest of the Phenomenology, is somewhat a reaction against the esotericism of some of his contemporaries who had otherwise been his friends. This is where we need to make a point and situate all this a bit historically, at least contextually. Today we can't imagine the importance of the historical upheaval within which Hegel's thought arose, the historical genesis of his thought.
4:32 At random, and abstractly in the pejorative sense, that is, without all the mediations that this presupposes, I would nonetheless remind you that this is the moment when we begin to see the first effects of the industrial revolution that would occur in England, the economic revolution, and of the French Revolution, the political revolution — these are the enormous cracks, such as occur roughly every 20 centuries, that constitute the historical perimeter within which Hegel develops his thought, and in particular, his whole youth passed through this immense current, what Armel Guerne, an excellent translator of the German Romantics, calls the fabulous verbal ocean of German Romanticism.
5:15 It would be better to say German idealism, so as to include both the philosophical texts of that era and the properly poetic or literary texts, for this is a peculiarity of the thought of that time — and this applies equally to Hegel's contemporaries like Fichte, Schelling, and a fortiori Hölderlin — that the poets of that era spontaneously tend toward the philosophical, which is very clear in Hölderlin, for example, and conversely, philosophical language, instead of remaining dryly abstract, sometimes rises to the poetic.
5:51 Let me give you an excerpt from a work written slightly earlier, two years before the Phenomenology, one of those works where Hegel's system begins to take shape, a passage I had quoted, moreover, for those who were kind enough to come to the Hegel Pride event with our friend Losurdo — it's a passage I quoted, I'll repeat it, where he speaks of rather elementary moments, where spirit has not yet arrived at language, at the concept, where it is in the night, what he calls the night of images.
6:23 This image, the night, must be taken in the literal sense, very concretely, like when you're at the cinema — there needs to be darkness for everyone to see the images that must appear, the camera obscura, the dark chamber. And he says the following — it doesn't matter if we don't understand all the content, it seems fairly clear to me, but what matters is seeing, once again, how the sentence almost tends toward the poem, which is unexpected coming from a philosopher: "This image belongs to spirit, it is in possession of it, it is its master; the image is preserved in the treasury of spirit, in the night of spirit, it is unconscious, that is, it does not have to be exposed as an object before representation."
6:59 "Man is this night, this empty nothingness that contains everything in its simplicity, a wealth of representations, of infinitely multiple images, none of which precisely comes to mind. It is the night, the interior of nature that exists here, in fantasmagoric representation. It is night all around." — This isn't me repeating it, it's him. "Here suddenly there arises a bloody head, there another white silhouette," — strange passage, a white head, a bloody silhouette, red and white, like the Japanese flag — "a white silhouette, and they disappear of their own accord."
7:29 "It is this night that one discovers when one looks a man in the eyes. One plunges one's gaze into a night that becomes frightful. It is the night of the world that advances here to meet each one." You see? And conversely I could read you a text by Hölderlin that rises to the philosophical, which I'll refrain from doing, actually. There's a magnificent hymn called The Source of the Danube. Those who are somewhat familiar with this poetry know that in the last part of these great hymns, Hölderlin is fascinated by the image of rivers and the metaphor it represents. A river, a destiny.
8:01 And in one of these hymns devoted to the river, called precisely Am Quell der Donau, or The Source of the Danube — for reference, the Danube rises in the Black Forest very close to where Hölderlin spent his childhood. So it makes an extraordinary journey that fascinates the poet, since from the West, as it were, from the Black Forest, it goes backward, as Hölderlin says. It returns toward our origins, toward the East, since it empties into the Black Sea. That had struck him. And he says this, Hölderlin, listen: "As on the organ, in resounding splendid chords, within the sacred enclosure, very high, out of the pure gushing from the inexhaustible pipes sounds the awakening and the prelude of morning, and now far off, from hall to hall, in a tree of freshness the melodious fire pours forth and gradually fills with enthusiasm the whole dwelling in its fold of icy shadow, and behold, then behold rising toward the sun of the feast, and answering them, the voices of the faithful in chorus — thus came to us from the East the word" — because the word passes through Greece too — "and against the rocks of Parnassus" — through the flank of Cithaeron, from Asia — "I hear the echo come from the roofs, and it breaks against the Capitol, and from the Alps" — because it has to arrive in Germany, doesn't it — "and descended vertiginously from the Alps, it came to us, the foreign one"
9:11 "the awakener, the voice that shapes men, and all those it had struck with astonishment, its rays." You see, here we practically find Hegel's conception of history — Orient, Greek, Occident — in three stages, in Hölderlin, and conversely in Hegel we find poetic connotations. So it's in this rather strange fusion of poetic language and philosophical language that the future Hegelian system hatches. I say this because we are so used to reading — to reading the so-called Berlin works, from the last period, works that are moreover not even written for the most part in his own hand, I say this because many people don't know that — when we speak of Hegel's Aesthetics, we should know that these are lecture notes taken by his students, and we have several versions of the lectures depending on which student it was, and Hegel, who was extremely cautious because he knew he was being watched — there's no other word for it — by the Ministry of Cults — the Ministry of Cults, that is the Ministry of Cults in Berlin at that time — whose main political concern was not to let the contagion of French ideas spread — you see what that means
The result is nothing without its becoming 10:21 at the time — spread into the Holy Roman Empire, which Napoleon would put an end to shortly afterward, by the way, and so Hegel always takes this censorship into account, and often it's the so-called Berlin works — the four volumes of his monumental Aesthetics, which is the first developed philosophical aesthetics after Kant's — it was recent as a discipline, after Kant's Critique of Judgment — the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, which is much the same thing, one of the most read and most familiar of Hegel's works, entitled — it's no small feat of his — Reason in History, or again the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion — all these Berlin texts, which are clearer than the Phenomenology we are about to tackle, which is nevertheless thirty years earlier, are clearer precisely because they are addressed to students who are supposed to be beginners, and Hegel is often confused with this final state of his publications, whereas, as he himself says, it is a fundamental proposition
11:32 of Hegelianism — if one had to say, or at least retain a few of them, this one: the result is nothing without its becoming. This is a statement present in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit — I'll say "the Pheno" for short — the result is nothing without its becoming, that is, a thought, a result, an abstraction is nothing if we abstract, in the literal sense, from the entire path that led to that result. And so the Berlin lectures, to come back to them, seem clear, but it's a clarity that, to be understood, presupposes all the mediations — Hegelianism has often been called a philosophy of mediation — all the mediations that give what Hegel calls a content to an abstract truth. And for that there are strikingly simple examples: for instance, he says that when a child says "life is hard" — say a child has heard this, a little seven- or eight-year-old brat who says "life is hard" — it doesn't have the same content, Hegel says, as when a man who has fought in three wars
12:42 and who has suffered through illness and lived through unhappy passion says "life is hard" — it's the same statement, but you see, in the old man's case it's a result taken together with its becoming, and not abstracted from the whole process that makes it true — because is it true or false that life is hard? It doesn't matter — in the child's mouth it is false in the Hegelian sense, that is, false not in the sense of being inexact, like saying 2 plus 3 equals 7, for example, which is false in the sense of being inexact, but false in the Hegelian sense, that is, false by abstraction — it is formally true but precisely lacking content, so it is false. There, I hope I'm being clear on this point, but it's a point we'll often have the occasion to come back to. So don't count on me — because that would be very un-Hegelian — to summarize his thought in some fundamental statement that would contain in germ all the others, because Hegel is the first to say, including about his own thought, that a fundamental or first statement of philosophy, as they say — he's the one speaking — even if it appears true, is already false insofar as it is merely the beginning, or the fundamental or general proposition; what matters is precisely what he calls the development
The hecatomb of German Romanticism 13:52 that is going to give it content. I think the example of "life is hard" is sufficiently telling in this regard. So, to return to this context I wanted to specify, that of German idealism — I made this long detour to recall that I include under it both German idealism and German Romanticism, with its properly literary but also musical aspect, and the philosophical text that hatched in that era, all those situated roughly between Kant and Hegel, that is, passing through Fichte and Schelling. It's indispensable to become somewhat familiar with this context to understand a work like the Phenomenology, which is somewhat its culmination. In fact this whole fabulous verbal ocean, to repeat Armel Guerne's phrase — what characterizes German Romanticism, seen from outside, is first of all a slaughter — it's important to be struck by that — the notion of the accursed poet is familiar to a French-speaking audience, if I may say so — for us, the notion of the accursed poet
15:02 is much later than that of Romanticism, and a fortiori of German Romanticism, which is a generation earlier than ours — I'm making a little chronological reminder here — but officially Romanticism, in our own literary textbooks, begins with the appearance of Lamartine's Poetic Meditations in 1821, if I remember correctly. In 1821 most of the great German Romantics had already been dead for a long time, or mad — I'll come back to that when I speak of a slaughter. Most of the German Romantics died mad or by suicide — a catastrophe occurred at the level of the mind that recalls that of the future accursed poets, to the point that people like, I don't know, Kleist who committed suicide, Novalis who died at 29, Wackenroder who died at 24, foreshadow more people like Artaud, Van Gogh, up to a point — you see that our own Romantics, who remain still very strangled by the old form, as Rimbaud says in a letter — so it's important, when we speak of Romanticism, that there be no misunderstanding — we must somewhat forget our Vigny, our Musset, and become familiar with a literature
16:12 that was rather poorly known until recent years — people have started talking a little about the German Romantics again, they've been somewhat resurrected in the form of misunderstandings, sometimes through Surrealism, which was fascinated by their oneiric side — for being a German Romantic — and there have been several occasions to bring them back into fashion; it's starting to take shape a little. But I insist on the aspect of the slaughter. For reference, Goethe and Schiller are considered classics in Germany; they precede this vast movement, they preserved themselves from the slaughter. They are classics, moreover, who were very wary of the Romantics, to the point that Goethe, when he saw all of young Germany filing past his house to see him, to talk to him, all these young Romantic poets who came in the manner of "let's go see a great man, sir, me and Goethe" — he would often say this to them: "if someone has something to say, let them tell me clearly; as for problematic things, those I have within me suffice."
17:22 You see, so we clearly distinguish Goethe and Schiller, the classics — we'll come back to this generation I'm speaking of, from which Hegel comes and of which he is a survivor. It's very important to see the extent to which the work we've studied was a way for him to escape from this deadly impasse into which German Romanticism had ended up drifting. He alludes to this in a fairly famous text we studied together, a letter to Windischmann, a letter dating from 1810, I believe — which makes me think, 1810, you see the connotations, one thinks of the Grande Armée, of Napoleon, as I said earlier, the great historical cracks of that era: the English industrial revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic epic with Europe plowed from Spain to Moscow, no less. It's in this context that the text we're going to work on appears, and in this letter to Windischmann, Hegel alludes to his so-called Frankfurt period — there are, one might say, stages in the genesis of Hegel's thought, of his life; Frankfurt is a bit like the second-to-last stage before Jena — it's in Jena that the Phenomenology was written — and he says, yes, it was in unfortunate
Enlightenment and Romanticism: understanding, reason, escapism 18:32 Frankfurt — famous phrase — "that I lived through a crisis to the point of exhaustion of my strength" — today we'd call it a depression — "it's there that I approached" — he put it rather mysteriously — "the nocturnal point of contradiction." So you see, he himself was not spared from this vast movement that I liken to a slaughter. So we need to understand — to see how this happened among all these writers — we need to understand what they inherit; they inherit contradictory things, and this will allow us to get to Hegel, as you know, a philosophy that not only doesn't set contradiction aside but on the contrary makes it the very engine of being, and in particular of historical being. And the main contradiction of this generation is that it proceeds, on one hand — it comes after, hello, the French Enlightenment, the Lights that France chiefly illustrated — the Lights that are called in Germany, since there's an equivalent movement
19:43 in the wake of the French Enlightenment, the Aufklärung — that's a word, "the clarification" — it's not quite the same as the Lights — it's a movement with people like Lessing and above all Kant, of course, who is the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment. And so this generation inherits both the effort of the Enlightenment — everyone knows what that implies, the Enlightenment, that is, a break with the old world, a critique of immediate knowledge, of induction, of the religious, of the substantial world, as Hegel will later say, in favor of a world of thought, of the rational, a world where every truth must be submitted to the examination of the intellect, of what Hegel will later call, following Kant, who made a distinction that would be crucial for this whole generation — the distinction between understanding and reason, because very often in contemporary philosophical discussions the two get mixed up, and reason gets reduced to understanding, especially when used pejoratively. And so, when it comes to the intellect in the pure sense, such as it operates in a scientific work or simply in the good sense
20:53 that Descartes speaks of, which means that when we say A equals B, this implies that B equals A — we will reserve for this kind of intelligence the precise concept of understanding, Verstand in German, clearly distinguishing it from reason, Vernunft — Vernunft, which since Kant, beyond its great difference from understanding, doesn't have only a cognitive function but also an ethical function aimed at action. In any case, this generation, you can see why it was a bit difficult for it to struggle between, on one hand, the rational heritage, in a word, of the Enlightenment, and, as an antithesis, this vast movement that is Romanticism, which is a kind of rebellion against — I'm still talking about the narrow, reductive romantic side of understanding, of rationalization. It's in this contradiction that almost this entire generation struggles, and we should know that in the first part of his formation, Hegel himself had philosophically espoused the Romantic point of view, in particular that of his young — I was going to say elder, he was actually a bit younger than him — I'm talking about Schelling
22:03 he was a bit younger than him, but he became famous before the other two, and so he was a little bit the leader of the trio — Schelling — and Schelling is by far the one who developed the most complete, the most profound philosophical system as an expression of German Romanticism, and Hegel subscribed to Schelling's point of view up until the Phenomenology of Spirit, which is the work through which he suddenly explains how he detaches himself from this movement and how he makes a return, how he rehabilitates the concept — therefore reason, the concept proper to Kant and Fichte — against romantic intuition. So it's very important to keep firmly in mind this contradiction that somewhat governs this whole generation between the rational impulse of the Enlightenment and — I'm not saying counter-revolution, not yet, although it sometimes turns into that — this reaction
23:15 in any case, romantic reaction against the excess of light. We shouldn't forget, for example, that if we had to, by way of metonymy — as you know, metonymy is, among other things, expressing the — sorry, expressing the part for the whole, I say "a sail" to mean "a boat," or I say "drink a glass" when in fact I'm drinking its contents — and so, as a metonymy, a title that would sum up all by itself the whole spirit of German Romanticism, an emblematic title, would be Novalis's Hymns to the Night. Novalis, who is often considered the most romantic of the Romantics — but Hymns to the Night, we are hardly in the — pardon — hardly in the Enlightenment. And when Novalis speaks of the night, it's of course a metaphorical night, and so as not to be mistaken, he says very clearly, in a superb text, one of the most poetic, in which, speaking to the night, he invokes it, he says: "only fools misunderstand you and mistake you for the shadow you cast upon us at twilight, out of compassion for us, at twilight"
24:25 of the evident night — so he's not speaking of the astronomical night, of course. On the other hand he says, "they do not sense you at all" — he's still speaking to the night — "they do not sense you at all" — well, we'll see what the night is: "in the golden flow of the grapes" — what is that? It's wine, it's alcohol, it's hubris, it's the Dionysian — one could say the golden flow of the grapes — "in the brown sap of the poppy" — that's opium — there you already have the whole program of Baudelaire; there's a chapter of Flowers of Evil called "Wine," the Artificial Paradises — you see, it's already there in German Romanticism, I want to insist on this. Hegel is one of our contemporaries — we always think it's new, ultra-modern — it is: it's a fundamental break with the old world, and this break occurred in the late 18th, early 19th century, and this is a thesis I state dogmatically for now, without supporting it — I prefer to support it in the context of a discussion among ourselves rather than dogmatically — but I personally think that we are still in that era, we are still there — hence the misunderstandings about the end of history — and it's in that era that Hegel speaks of the end of history, which Marx will replace, more precisely, as the end of human prehistory
25:35 more than a nuance, but it doesn't change much regarding the fact that it's a fundamental break, and that since that period we haven't ceased — this is the thesis, I mean, well, dogmatically, but to be clear anyway and not to lose the demonstration for now — since that period we have been in a kind of knowledge — we acquired, in that period, a knowledge that we have been trying to flee, in the Freudian sense of repression if you want a metaphor, to flee, ever since — and almost all literary or political or philosophical movements since then are an alternation between returning to this accession to knowledge which is the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment, and, on the contrary, escaping from it — a thought, then, of action, and on the contrary an escapist thought, thinking of escaping it by all means, including — I come back to Novalis — the golden flow of the grapes, drinking to forget, isn't it, the golden flow of the grapes, the brown sap of the poppy — and there's even Eros, since he continues afterward
26:46 I'll say the outdated phrase, because it's beautiful: "they do not sense you at all, they always speak to the night, in the golden flow of the grapes, in the brown sap of the poppy, and they do not know that it is you who thus haloes the tender breast of the Virgin and makes of us a paradise." There you have it, so we have practically the three, almost the three chapters of Flowers of Evil: wine, artificial paradises, and Eros. You see, German Romanticism is much more concrete and much more nocturnal, up to a point, than our own Romanticism. This contradiction that runs through this whole generation, we're going to find it again in the preface to the Phenomenology, a most famous text if ever there was one in Hegelian scholarship — I'll point out the passage found separately in the edition, and there are two main editions — there's one from Vrin with a very good translation by Bourgeois, and one which in my opinion is even better, Hyppolite's, from Aubier-Montaigne — unfortunately the Phenomenology of Spirit in two volumes in Hyppolite's translation is no longer available. It's a scandal, actually, in my opinion, it's like this
27:57 that we came to know Hegel in France, over the past 60 years, and now it's no longer available. But on the other hand, the preface in bilingual edition is still available, and this preface was written by Hegel after finishing the Phenomenology. So if we want, even if it's not very Hegelian — I said this earlier — to summarize a thought, because it is precisely in its development that this thought verifies itself for Hegel, and not when it is condensed — if there had to be an exception, if there were a text where we could be sure to lose as little of Hegel as possible, it would be this magnificent preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. I say he wrote the preface after finishing the volume, and I can't help but think of Mozart, who, the night before the premiere of Don Giovanni, remembered — oh, I forgot the overture! — and it's during the night that Mozart writes the overture. There you go. And so this contradiction, I come back to it because I'm going to illustrate it now, between the effort at rationalization that characterizes the Aufklärung, the age of Enlightenment, and the reaction
29:07 against this effort — a reaction that I sum up under the category of escapism, which I'm proposing here — escaping, escape, as they say in Italian, and the Romantic escapism. This contradiction is going to be found again in the preface, through two philosophies — two philosophers, more precisely — who were somewhat the unavoidable reference points of the era: Fichte on one hand and Schelling on the other. You'll see that many passages of the preface — you'll hear me a bit, a bit at random, trying to trace back to these two references. There, or rather I could clarify — oh sorry.
Lenin, Plato, translations: the difficulty of Hegel 30:24 Yes, I'll still give you, by way of the translation — we're dealing with a philosopher renowned for his difficulty — there's an example I hold dear, of those who confronted this difficulty with great courage and great positive results. I'm thinking of Lenin. Lenin has to flee, chased by the Tsar's police, in 1915; he takes refuge in Switzerland, not far from Zurich, then Lucerne, and so, for once, there he is, stuck, unable to keep on militating, unable to act any longer, and so of course he takes advantage of it to make this great theoretical detour, of which we've known, since the famous passage in Plato's Republic, that without it there is no serious philosophy — that is, I'm making a parenthetical remark of my own here — since Plato, we must know that every philosophy begins with a political failure, whether it's conscious
31:34 on the philosopher's part or not, it makes no difference. Of Plato we have preserved seven letters — there isn't much correspondence surviving from antiquity, but there was already such a cult of Plato's works at the time that, fortunately, several copies were made, and at least seven letters have reached us — and the famous seventh letter, in which Plato recounts his political misadventures, how he was summoned by Dionysius, the tyrant — meaning ruler — of Syracuse at that time, quite simply in Sicily, as an advisor, a bit like Frederick of Prussia had summoned Voltaire, and like Catherine of Russia had summoned Diderot, Christina of Sweden had summoned Descartes — it was the era when the French Enlightenment served as technical advisors to all of political Europe — and there it had been the case: Dionysius had said to Plato, "I govern Sicily, I'm going to be able to put your ideas into practice" — the intellectual's dream — and you know how it ended: after two or three pieces of advice, when Dionysius saw that it was going to change his whole life, what Plato was telling him, he had him arrested, sold him as a slave, and fortunately Plato had some connections in Athens, a bit of money
32:44 they managed to buy him back, you see, and it's following this political failure that he founded the Academy — you know, when we say "academic" pejoratively, it always surprises me a bit, it has noble letters, the first Academy — and Plato, in this letter, says this famous phrase: "while my eyes remained fixed on politics, I was as if compelled to turn toward philosophy." I insist on this because we often oppose philosophers, intellectuals a bit, as dreamers, abstract types, versus the man of action — sorry, that is, Plato is the first to say that if he took up philosophy, it's because he couldn't go all the way politically, and when he says "I was compelled to turn toward philosophy," in Greek he says ananke — those who've done a bit of Greek know it's almost a damnation in the Greek word, ananke is almost a curse, being compelled. This little detour finished, let me take the opportunity, regarding the translations you have at your disposal today, to show you — I'll take as a sample different
33:54 possible translations of the Hegelian text, the first sentence of the preface to the Phenomenology, from three different translators. You see, I'll take Hyppolite's — the one that's no longer available, even though it shaped nine-tenths of Hegelian commentary in France since just before the war, let's say. The first sentence is this one — so the first sentence, Hegel translated by Hyppolite, in the preface preceding his work: "An author usually explains the aim he has set for himself, the occasion that led him to write, the relations that, in his opinion, his work bears with the treatises — the preceding or contemporary treatises on the same subject. In the context of a philosophical work, such a clarification appears not only superfluous but also improper and unsuited to the nature of philosophical inquiry." I move on to the much more recent translation by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre — these are all remarkable efforts, but still this first sentence becomes this: "The explanations one is accustomed to giving in a preface at the head of a work in order to clarify the ends the author has set for himself" — here you can already sense someone trying to imitate German syntax
35:05 with the verb thrown to the end — it's a bit harder — "the motivations that are his own, and the relation that this work bears, in his view, to other treatises, earlier or contemporary, dealing with this same subject, seem not only superfluous, in the case of a work of philosophy, but even, given the nature of the thing, inadequate and contrary to the goal pursued." It's already quite different, but still, we find the same framework, and it remains somewhat more comprehensible. When I get to this one — when I get to this one, I read this: — who is this?
35:37 So it's the preface I was just quoting — there, it's Jarczyk and Labarrière, who also translated the Science of Logic — Pierre-Jean Labarrière — and the first sentence gives this: I'll see that it doesn't get any simpler — "An explanation, such as one puts forward in the preface to a piece of writing, is customarily offered regarding the end the author has set for himself, as well as regarding the motivations and the relation in which he believes" — brackets, "Hegel," as if we hadn't understood, of course — "this piece of writing stands with respect to the treatment of other, earlier or contemporary, works on this same object — seems, with regard to a philosophical writing, not only superfluous" — that's the only word common to all three — "but even, by reason of the nature of the thing, improper and counter to the end." We don't often use the expression "counter to the end" in French — already you see, they say Hegel is difficult, but we shouldn't add to it with the translations either. There, have you finished your detour on Lenin? You started it but I think you went off on a detour — No, no, no, I haven't finished at all, but you know my way of proceeding, it's a bit spiral-shaped, I showed you these three directions because Lenin — Lenin's text —
36:47 he himself is Russian-speaking, moreover in his annotations he uses both German and French — it's fascinating to read this reading of a reading, that is, when you read this text of Lenin's, in the famous Philosophical Notebooks, you see Lenin discovering a philosopher he distrusts. He had learned, in the vulgar current Marxology — it's not me who says vulgar, it's him, because — realize — Lenin is going to understand that everyone got it wrong reading Marx for lack of having read Hegel properly, and it's the reverse of Althusser, and Lenin, as he advances in his reading, sees all at once that all the representations he had — "oh Hegel, well, he's a bit better than the average bourgeois philosopher" — I'm restoring a bit here the Marxological vulgate of the time, the Marxographic doxography — a bit better, fine, because there was still dialectics after all, he talks sometimes about the labor of the master and the slave, that's not bad, but still it's caught in a mystical, religious husk — he approaches Hegel still the way schoolchildren do nowadays with that image — and as he advances, he's blown away, as the youth today would say, by the Marxian relevance of Hegel.
37:59 And it's the quotation from Lenin with which I want to end this little detour through Vladimir Ilyich — it's about the difficulty of Hegel's text; at one point he notes — it's comical but still — he says these passages should be called "the best way to catch a migraine." You see, to say it's not from today that we know Hegel is difficult. Well, if I dwell on Hegel's difficulty, it's to make you understand to what extent it's a paradox to speak of Hegel's difficulty, when the aim he sets for himself — I started with this earlier — is a didactic and pedagogical aim; so in principle, and it's he himself who says it, "I wanted to bring philosophical consciousness down to common consciousness, and raise common consciousness up to philosophical consciousness" — in short, to take as an example this new literary genre, you see how we come back to the fusion of the poetic and the philosophical, which was inaugurated by Rousseau's Emile, where we follow an individual from his very beginnings to the accomplishment of his maturity, being attentive to the different stages.
39:09 or trials that he is led to go through, which will continue with a work that is less well known, unfortunately little read in France - I'm thinking of a work by Goethe. Everyone knows Goethe's Faust, or a few of his poems and a few of his plays, but there is his last novel, which is undoubtedly his masterpiece, called The Apprenticeship Years of Wilhelm Meister. It's exactly what's called a Bildungsroman, where we follow - this was Goethe's intention, it's not me who calls it that - the little German bourgeois from his childhood to his maturity, and it continues even beyond that. When you look at Flaubert's Sentimental Education, that's also a Bildungsroman, a novel that shows all the stages that the young person of the romantic generation must go through, up to the bitter lucidity of his maturity - bitter knowledge, the kind one draws from the journey, as Baudelaire said. So, paradox: how can a thought that wanted precisely to break with the confused genius of some of its contemporaries in order to focus on a didactic aim...
In praise of the exoteric against the prestige of mystery 40:23 appear to us, on the contrary, as the most difficult and apparently the most esoteric of philosophies? And yet, yes, let me read you this. Oh, because I made a mistake. Wait, let me leave you a moment. There.
40:54 This is what is in the preface, page 14 of the Aubier edition, that is, of Hyppolite's translation. What is perfectly determinate is at the same time exoteric - the opposite of esoteric. So communicable, publishable, transmissible. What is perfectly determinate is at the same time exoteric, conceivable, and capable of being taught to all and of being the property of all. The intelligible form of science is the way of science. The way - when he says science, it's knowledge in general as opposed to opinion, it's not just the hard sciences, it includes them but isn't reducible to them.
41:27 So, the intelligible form of science is the way of science, a way open to all and equal for all. To attain rational knowledge by means of the understanding is the rightful demand of the consciousness that approaches science, for the understanding is thought, the pure self in general, and the intelligible aspect of what is already known - the element common to science and to pre-scientific consciousness, which can thus immediately open a passage toward science. You see, the intention becomes a bit clearer. There's a praise of the exoteric against those...
41:59 because, in the romantic era, there is a prestige attached to mystery, to the esoteric, to mystery, to what is veiled. We find this still in Heidegger's conception of truth. Those familiar with Heidegger's thought remember all those pages where he talks about aletheia, because the Greek term could mean truth, right? Lethe, within the veil - truth would be unveiling, right? But Heidegger keeps making us understand that one only unveils by covering over, one only illuminates by obscuring.
42:31 In short, if it wasn't confused before, it becomes so afterward. So here, on the contrary, there is praise of what is clear, of what is communicable, of what is transmissible, and then he insists twice: a way open to all and equal for all. There are effects of the French Revolution in German thought, aren't there? The effects of the social contract, if you prefer. And so Hegel very quickly understood that thoughts - I'm not talking about poetic texts, one can make wonderful use of literary and poetic mystery.
43:03 On the other hand, in the search for knowledge, which is somewhat the etymology of the term philosophy after all - in the quest for knowledge, or in the love of knowledge, to take the exact etymology, but that loves each inquiry, right, it amounts to the same thing - in this quest, Hegel clearly saw that a thought which believes it links the true with the magical and the irrational is a poor, crude thought. In that era, people didn't know much, which is why kings each had their own magician, their astrologer, precisely because there wasn't much to share, and in an economy of scarcity - this is a metaphor I'm using, this crude knowledge resembles an economy of scarcity - in an economy of scarcity, one always believes there won't be enough for everyone, so one hides things.
43:48 True knowledge is generous, and even at the height of the Cold War - to take exactly the opposite example - even at the height of the Cold War, in the 1970s, Americans and Soviets did not hide from each other, in fundamental journals, their findings - I'm talking about fundamental research, of course - the results of their respective fundamental research in physics, in chemistry; they were published in all the works available to everyone. Of course, they weren't going to reveal such-and-such a passage that had a practical application for some military technology, but fundamental research itself, the kind that would find applications perhaps three generations later - I would say they had understood very well that it would be a setback for everyone to hide, precisely, to make mysterious what should be clear.
The pedagogical as antechamber of the political: humanizing the animal 44:32 So, this triad is important: clear content, hence transmissible, hence communicable, and hence having a political scope. We see that the didactic is here the antechamber of the political - the pedagogical as antechamber of the political is an idea that goes back to the Renaissance. Don't forget that the Enlightenment, the Age of Enlightenment, since each century has a number - 17th, 16th, 18th - that's a bit abstract, it doesn't say much about the content, but also a nickname that's a bit more explicit.
45:03 The Renaissance for the 16th century, the century of the Sun King, or the century of classicism, or the Grand Siècle for the 17th, the Enlightenment for the 18th - and so I'm saying that the Enlightenment somewhat picks up on the Renaissance. Here, I'm trying to have you picture a bit, on your inner screen, a kind of diagram where you'd see a process starting from the Middle Ages and, let's say, the French Revolution to frame it roughly within a chronological sequence that more or less holds together.
45:35 And when you examine this sequence, you see that the 16th century, the Renaissance, was above all a century of questioning. A prodigious work of questioning - questioning what? Not the previous century, but the previous millennium. The Middle Ages is not a century. We move rather quickly over it, but still, I mean, from the end of the Roman Empire to the discovery of the Americas or the invention of printing, however you want to put it - all that is somewhat contemporary, I mean, it's several centuries following one another.
46:09 And so, it's entirely to the credit of the Renaissance and the 16th century to have delivered, let's say, enormous battering-ram blows to the habits that had accumulated during that period, while still preserving the best of it - let me explain. During the Middle Ages, the essential, cultural relationship is a vertical relationship of man to God. It's the religious period par excellence. This relationship, this relation of man to God, is called religion. Starting from the Renaissance - I'm thinking of a writer like Machiavelli, as typical of the Renaissance, and of whom Hegel is the first modern reader, Hegel is the first to have a reading that rehabilitates Machiavelli.
46:48 When you read Machiavelli - or Rabelais, or Erasmus - you see clearly that the essential relation is not the vertical relation of man to God, but of man to man. The political relation, this time, and no longer the religious one. And it's no accident - I'm still illustrating my point about the relation between the pedagogical as antechamber of the political. Well, look closely at Rabelais: the high points of Gargantua and Pantagruel are education. He devotes hundreds of pages to the new education Gargantua must undergo in order to no longer be a man of the Middle Ages, in order not to - doctor - eat only meats, etc., but to add vegetables.
47:26 We see that he had studied in Montpellier, Rabelais. As for Montaigne, need I say more - we know well the importance of education for him. And so, it's no accident. These intellectuals knew well that by shaping the child, one shapes the future citizen. That's where the mediation between the pedagogical and the political lies. Shaping the child is not merely a psychological attitude, it's not - I'm looking for the term in the animal world - it's not the training that, in the animal world, parents give their young.
48:01 It's not so that they can, in the end, reproduce the same life for millennia. It's exactly the opposite. In the human case, it's so that the child will go further than what we have done. The way bees communicate with each other, which has been very well studied by Frisch, with their famous dance, etc., which indicates both where the food is found. By whom? Frisch, Frisch, who studied it a great deal. F-R-I-S-C-H. And a famous work that gives both the direction and even the distance according to the frequency, the figure-eight dance that bees perform.
48:32 Still, this communication among bees - we'll see later why it's not a language - is an extremely sophisticated communication, but it's not a language, easily, because there is no metaphor. Bees, from the bees of a million years ago to those of today, have the same mode of communication. There is no progress, no evolution, and the bees of Japan or elsewhere have the same mode of communication, whereas the Japanese language and the French language are not the same. We are not in the same world. So, the education of children is not merely the education of a small animal so that it becomes a large adult animal.
49:06 It's a matter of humanizing an animal, which is not at all the same thing, of making an animal become man. And, a passage here - we can't even think about what I just said. There.
49:36 Hegel is raising here a rather difficult problem in philosophy, the problem of mediation. I'll pass over it for now, we'll have so much need to come back to it. But anyway, reason is misunderstood when reflection is excluded from the true - because the Romantics excluded reflection from the true. In the absolute, there is, for them, neither reflection, nor thought, nor mediation, everything is an immediate. Well, he's being a bit ironic about that. Reason is misunderstood, then, when reflection is not conceived as a positive moment of the absolute. For Hegel, reflection is a positive moment of the absolute. It is reflection that raises the true to a result, and it is also reflection that removes the opposition that existed between the true and its becoming.
50:13 And now you'll ask me, what does this have to do with what I was saying about man and animal? You'll see. If the embryo is indeed in itself man, the fetus, the embryo, if it is indeed in itself - it's underlined - man, it is nevertheless not so for itself. For itself, it is man only as reason cultivated and developed, which has made itself what it is in itself. Hegel, here anticipating the work of Lucien Malson on feral children - great jazz scholar and specialist in feral children, also a sociologist, an anthropologist, Lucien Malson.
50:45 It was a book that was very widespread in the 1970s, in the 10/18 paperback series - I don't know if it's still available, we'd have to check, but it's something of a classic in this field. Feral children, the Mowglis, wolf-children, bear-children, pig-children in Poland, Truffaut's films. Sorry? Truffaut's films. Yes, which was inspired - he was inspired, I believe, by Victor, the wild child of Aveyron. And all the examples of feral children confirm exactly what Hegel says: if there is no human intervention, irreversible lesions occur in the brain. If language hasn't been learned by a certain age, it can no longer be learned afterward.
51:17 And the feral children who have been taken in among men, in India especially, because it's a bit more common there, but it happens everywhere - it's a bit more frequent there. I believe there are 600 children a year who die, devoured by hyenas or wolves in villages in India. What's striking is that one can, at a pinch, put clothes on them, whatever, the poor kids, and get them to walk more or less upright, they no longer go on all fours - but what one has never been able to do is make them speak. And seeing this - I'm not going to be the one to teach this to us moderns, coming after the 1960s, and there, the importance that linguistics has had since then at the heart of the human sciences - when you see the importance of language in thought, you can well imagine that there's still a long way from what Hegel calls what is in itself man - the embryo, it is in itself, which would have been interesting for the debates on abortion - but it is not so for itself.
52:07 Now, a thing is only what it is when it is in and for itself - that's vocabulary that recurs constantly in Hegel. Let me repeat this sentence, which is very modern for its time: if the embryo is indeed in itself man, it is nevertheless not so for itself. For itself, it is man only as reason cultivated and developed, which has made itself what it is in itself. It is the whole work of the human being to reconquer for himself what is acquired - an acquisition, more or less millennia-old, of manual and intellectual labors accomplished by his human brothers since the beginnings.
52:37 There. I've given you a bit of a tour of the preliminary difficulties we've run up against - a text renowned as among the most difficult in the history of published thought, and yet, paradoxically, a text that intends to be essentially pedagogical and exoteric. And so as not to multiply the difficulties, I'd like to know - I'd like to interrupt my remarks for a moment and gather a few questions to see if there are any...
The Logic and the Phenomenology 53:07 I wouldn't want to leave too many areas of obscurity behind us, and if I was a bit elliptical, evasive, or allusive on certain points, I'd be delighted to come back to them with you. Are there any questions about the preliminaries I've just been stirring up? Yes, Antoine? I wanted to ask about the Science of Logic - isn't that the major work? Let's start from the end of the shadow. The major work - that's a value judgment. I'm glad you asked the question, but it's a value judgment.
53:37 So, one can consider... one person will consider that Mozart's major work is Don Giovanni, and another will say The Magic Flute. After all, it's a value judgment. First, be careful with these words - not that they aren't beautiful, but be careful, we can't take them without reservation. Second, if we had asked Hegel your question, I think he would have answered yes. He would have said yes. Yes. It's the Great Logic, we say the Great Logic to avoid confusing it with the Small Logic, which is included in the Encyclopedia later on.
54:08 The Wissenschaft der Logik, the Science of Logic, in order of volume, which immediately follows the Phenomenology in the history of Hegel's publications. I told you earlier that what we take to be Hegel's works and... are in fact his Berlin lectures, and these are the notes taken by his students, gathered as best they could... Well, it's students who compiled them, but still, these are not the master's own first-hand works, so to speak, whereas, on his own initiative...
54:40 before he was a professor, before he had a career, so before he had to be wary of censorship, there are these publications, among which, very early on, one from his youth, before the Phenomenology, but very early: The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems - that's the first of his works - The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems, Faith and Knowledge, fine, the problems of the era, that, then the Phenomenology in 1807 precisely, and finally, by 1809 already, the Great Logic. Beyond that, there will only be lecture courses of which he himself says - Hegel, that's just a reference point - what matters is what he's going to say in the lecture hall, and the notes only serve as reference points for his discourse. It's a way of keeping a margin of maneuver and circulating things that were only valid orally between him and his listeners and that therefore never fell under the scissors of censorship since they were never published.
55:35 So, to answer your question, the Great Logic is undoubtedly the most colossal effort any philosopher has ever made to spell out the development of the concept, to speak in Hegelian terms - so it's the work, let's say, the most exhaustive, I would answer. There's less value judgment involved than in saying 'the major work.' It's the most exhaustive work, agreed, the most complete. There isn't a single problem that is set aside in the Great Logic. But commentators on Hegel agree that the Phenomenology, the work immediately preceding it, is the most brilliant.
56:12 There too, it's a value judgment. Right? And it is, in any case, the most fascinating, since it serves precisely as mediation in every sense. He is at the midpoint of his life when he writes it - medium, at the midpoint of his life - and at the same time a mediation, since, as I've taken a while to say, I hope it's starting to become clear, it's a work with a propaedeutic, pedagogical, didactic aim. So it's already a mediation. A work that must serve as mediation between the complexity of knowledge and the stage of opinion.
56:50 We all start out there. We all find ourselves there at the outset. So it's a mediating work in every respect, and above all, the work through which - and this, Hegel will never stop saying afterward, this answers your question well - every time he returns to the Phenomenology in his later works, it's to say: well, I don't need to demonstrate that, because I did it in the Phenomenology. It's the work that contains the demonstrations of what is presented elsewhere only as a raw result. It's a bit as if we had a theorem in mathematics that we used mechanically, without being able to prove it.
57:21 The raw result. So, there, yes, Hegel's logic is undoubtedly not at the center of our topic today. But your question is interesting because Hegel never stopped thinking about logic while he was writing the Phenomenology. That's interesting to know. And he said to himself - this is what makes up the whole essence of the project of this very particular work - there must be an introduction to the system of knowledge. The Logic is the first publication of what he calls the system of knowledge. Look closely at the full title - it's quite striking, actually.
57:52 The full title is: System of Science, of the Phenomenology, subtitle: First Part, Phenomenology of Spirit, colon, Science of the Experience of Consciousness. Really. That means the system of knowledge is the whole set of Hegelian publications up to the end of his life. It's knowledge, as we'll see when we get into the text itself, conceived as system. You see, we're at the opposite pole from the contemporary fashion which says that what is profound is the isolated fragment, the aphorism, the isolated, partial, atomized thought - and that there would be more depth in that famous sentence of Nietzsche's, quoted a thousand times over, than in fifteen volumes of Hegel. That's very fashionable.
58:34 So, in any case, I don't know if it's true, but in any case, it's less tiring. Can you tell us that Nietzsche sentence? Which one? Did you just say Nietzsche? No, I don't mean anything in particular. I think there is more genius in one aphorism of Nietzsche's, quoted a thousand times over, than in twenty volumes of Hegel's patient efforts to work through concepts. That suits the lazy - which is not the case with Nietzsche himself, he wasn't lazy. And one shouldn't confuse the good Lord with his saints. Sorry? Yes, go ahead, sir. Yes, no, perhaps it's a bit undeveloped, but I'd like you to come back a little to the distinction Hegel makes between understanding and reason.
Kant, the faculties, and the Socratic question 59:09 What you showed, if I understood correctly, is that Hegel rehabilitates the understanding. Oh yes, I thank you for that question. Not only does he rehabilitate it, but it is in this very work that he expresses this rehabilitation, which appears as a scandal in the Romantic era. To rehabilitate the understanding in the Romantic era is a provocation. It's intelligence in the driest, most abstract sense - the understanding. But no, what I'm about to say risks being obscure if I don't go back to the beginning of your question, that is, the distinction between understanding and reason. It's not Hegel who introduces it, it's Kant who deserves credit for introducing it, for the whole history of thought, after all.
59:41 Because in everyday language, when we say 'reason,' we mix everything together. We oppose the rational to the intuitive or the poetic, whereas at that point we should be talking about the understanding. So let's spell all this out. Kant presents himself often as offering a philosophy of the faculties, to put it quickly. And Kant spends his time trying to find a compromise between these three faculties that are, for us, I quote him, sensibility, then, in order, understanding and reason. Each has its own function in order to arrive at knowledge, of course.
1:00:13 So, sensibility, the first stage - I'm summarizing Kant with an axe, I'm sorry, he deserves better, but we'll have many occasions to come back to Kant through Hegel. Sensibility is the first of the faculties, the one on the front line, so to speak, under fire, if you like. It's the one that receives - for perception - what Kant calls the manifold of perception. There has to be a faculty to receive it. That's sensibility, the senses, more or less.
1:00:43 But this influx of sensations, such as an ant might be in contact with - an ant has all the sensations you like - is not enough to produce what we call concepts. That's the second stage. Just as sensibility consists of intuition, in the Kantian sense - not at all in the sense we now give to 'having an intuition,' but in the very precise sense of seeing, hearing, touching - the old sense, indeed, which is intueri. So, just as sensibility has intuition as its essential tool, so understanding, the second stage, must now subsume these intuitions under a concept.
1:01:23 The understanding is the faculty of concepts. That is, I see this, I see that, and well, I must gather them under the concept of tree. It's not always obvious. Between a dachshund and a Saint Bernard, the concept of dog isn't easy to work out. Yes, but we never think about it. So, let's see - I used to do these exercises often with my students, because my students always believe that in philosophy we're finally going to talk about profound things, I don't know, God, spirit, the soul, death. I tell them, of course - the students start by saying, a table is a thing made of wood, square or rectangular, resting on four legs.
1:02:02 Have you never seen round tables? Oh yes, that's true. It's not the shape that makes the table. It can be square, rectangular, whatever. But it's made of wood. Have you never seen tables made of iron, of stone, of gold, at the minister's house, why not? Of paper, when it's a multiplication table. So, that's quite awkward, because the shape isn't there anymore, the material isn't there anymore. We thought we knew what a table was. And we can verify - a sentence of Hegel's found in the preface to the Phenomenology - that what is well known, precisely because it is well known, is not known.
1:02:35 That's not unique to Hegel; we've known it since the beginning of philosophy, since Socrates's questions, that what we thought was quite familiar and well known is what we know the least, because it's what we're most used to. You know, when you live near Niagara Falls, you no longer hear it. And when the atmosphere doesn't weigh on your shoulders, you no longer notice that the atmosphere has weight - except when you go diving, or so I've been told. So let's be wary of what seems obvious because it's well known that... That's exactly where we need to check whether it really is well known, because, to repeat Hegel's formula, what is well known, precisely because it is well known, is not known.
1:03:09 I have the word, of course, on the expression it's well known, it's quite obvious that... So, there we are, the understanding, and so, I'm answering your question precisely, it's the faculty that gathers this multiplicity brought by sensibility, that will unify them under a concept. I take the Dachshund, the Spaniel, the Basset, the Saint-Bernard, and I make the concept of dog or the concept of tree. That looks simple, you know, but the difficulty, in every case, and Kant insists strongly on this, is that a tree will never open its chest to say, that's it, you can call me a tree.
1:03:41 There, I write tree above. The objects around us, especially those of nature, are not responsible for the way we name them. Language is a human affair. We must not ask the tree to answer whether it is indeed a tree or not. And this — I'm dwelling a bit on this point — is important for making intelligible a key effort of Hegel, a key effort of intellection, what he calls the concept. When we see the attitude of the astrologer of Antiquity, I say astrologer and not astronomer, the one who climbed up ziggurats, as they were called in Mesopotamia, naively thinking, mind you, that being 40 meters up would let him see the stars more precisely.
1:04:26 Well, if you look closely, there is here a binary relation between the astrologer and his object, the sun, the star, the moon, whichever. So, it's a monologue, I can ask myself what is the sun, what is the moon, etc. Only I speak, it's not the moon that will answer me, 'I am, no, I am not a star, I am a planet.' The moon cannot answer. On the other hand, at the foot of the ziggurat, there may be a little pot-bellied bearded man named Socrates who will not address the being that doesn't speak, that is, the moon, the sun, in short, the natural being, but who will turn to the astrologer and say: what do you call the sun?
1:05:07 That is the question with which philosophy begins. What do you call it, and not what is it? When we say what is it, being is already given. We're not sure, we ought to speak of things that exist. We must first know what we're calling something, and so, from the moment Socrates says from the bottom of the ziggurat to the astrologer, what do you call sun, afterward we'll see whether it exists or not depending on how you define it, how you've called it. I recall here the essential moment of the Platonic effort. At that point, we are no longer in a monologue, we are in a dialogue.
1:05:38 Because the little pot-bellied, bearded man addresses someone who speaks and who can answer him, and we can correct each other's answers mutually. I'll extend my answer because you're raising an essential knot between understanding and reason. In Plato's Gorgias, which is his work, no doubt his political masterpiece and one of the most tense works, as we speak of a tension in a debate where we're on the verge of a brawl, as the young people say, particularly in the dialogue between Socrates and Callicles, one of the striking early depictions in Plato of the future little Nazi-type figure.
1:06:18 Callicles, let's leave that aside — at the start of his dialogue, the pretext of the dialogue is: what is oratorical art? That is to say, there is always a pretext at the start of a Platonic dialogue, and here, the subject of the Gorgias is supposed to be: what is rhetoric, what is the art of oratory? So he addresses specialists, of course, as always, Gorgias, who was a very well-known Corinthian who charged very dearly for his lessons on how to convince a crowd, so as to win them over and gain the power that comes with it. Today we'd call that the media, communication consultants, or what do I know, PR firms — Gorgias is the Gorgias of his time.
1:06:55 The modern one, the sophist. Right, exactly. And — I won't develop this because it's precisely what Plato will clarify afterward — the other answers him, oratorical art is the art of persuading. Very good, Socrates tells him, you see, there I've gotten a determination, I've been given something, it's not like the moon or the tree that doesn't answer me. It won't tell me 'I'm made of colloidal cells.' So he gives what Hegel will call a determination. There. Oratorical art is persuasion.
1:07:27 Socrates answers him: in that case, geometers are orators. That's not what I meant. But wait, what does a geometer do? He demonstrates, he persuades. Yes or no? So, instead of giving me the difference, he gives me something common to every form of persuasion. If I take your definition, oratorical art is persuading. At that point, I could just as well — I don't agree — classify the geometer among the sophists. Ah, I don't agree. Neither do I. So we do agree that it's not the same thing. Then, as we progress, we'll see the difference.
1:07:57 It's that, you see, my dear Gorgias, Socrates tells him, indeed there are two forms of persuasion. One, whose aim is opinion, whose aim is not knowledge, whose aim, as we saw earlier with Hegel, or with Rabelais, Montaigne, Rousseau, and all the Bildungsromane, is not to raise up the one who doesn't know to knowledge, but on the contrary aims to keep him in non-knowledge, in approximation, in vagueness, in all those murky waters where I can be dressed up any way you like. And that's rhetoric — just as, I hope there's no lawyer among us, but often the bad lawyer, or the shady lawyer, as the language nicely puts it, is the one who will deploy treasures of persuasion to arrive at a non-truth, the essential thing not being truth, the goal pursued not being truth, but that my client be acquitted, which is not quite a theoretical goal but a practical one, and thus not of the order of true and false.
1:08:49 There. This detour through Plato's Gorgias is very useful for integrating into the history of philosophy this effort of the concept, because it takes work — we said persuasion is good, it's a first determination of oratorical art. But of this persuasion — that's the genus, and now we'll see the species, and then the definition will be complete — of this persuasion which leads not to knowledge, as the geometer does in his demonstrations, the man of science in general, we can generalize, but as the rhetor or sophist does, a persuasion that leads to a doxa, to an opinion.
1:09:24 And there. So you see the progression — the discussion, Gorgias had started by saying oratorical art is the finest of things, Socrates tells him, before it's the finest, first tell me what it is; when he says what it is, it's persuasion; ah but it's not the same persuasion as the geometers'; and finally, from the best to the finest of things, we arrive at something rather sordid, namely how to convince anyone of anything, independent of the value of truth. You see, and well, this work, this is the work of the understanding, you see, I'm answering your question, because it presupposes that the interlocutor — and this is the revolution carried out by Plato, it's not me saying it, it's Hegel in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, his political testament, written in Berlin, who says that Plato initiated the world revolution.
1:10:09 Astonishing, when you see what's happening in the city with the crisis, this expression 'world revolution,' by doing what? Precisely by asking the concept, and the understanding, to settle debates between opinions. We don't content ourselves with asserting an opinion. For the first time, Plato — to put it clearly, I'll sum it up like this, and this is what's remarkable — for the first time, the problem, more than that you agree with me, that you all agree with me, or with Hegel, or with Kant, or with Nietzsche, the problem is that you agree with yourself.
1:10:42 That's what Socrates does with Gorgias. You said it's persuasion, so do you agree that the geometer is a rhetor? No — well, there, you no longer agree with yourself, good, let's continue. You see, freedom is preserved, that's the great difference with discussions of opinion, so-called café-conversation discussions, which have their own usefulness besides, because we spend good times together, they let us have a drink, but whose aim is not essentially knowledge, precisely because there's a kind of violence and imposition of one person's opinions on another, whereas knowledge presupposes — and this happened, not first in philosophy, but in mathematics, which is quite significant, Euclid predates Plato — that what I'm about to say is only true insofar as you grant it to me.
1:11:26 It's interesting to note that the first work of systematic mathematics ever published in history, the famous Elements of Euclid, which can still be found, I believe, in the Hermann editions, the notion — like every mathematician, Euclid begins with what are called first notions in mathematics. First notions are those that cannot be demonstrated, because they are fundamental, basic, but which serve to demonstrate all the others. So this is more familiar to you under notions like axioms or postulates.
1:11:56 We start first with axioms, postulates, and afterward, thanks to them, which are not demonstrated, we demonstrate everything else. Now of course, the goal of the operation is that there shouldn't be too many of them at the start, because good economy means the minimum of undemonstrated propositions to derive a maximum of demonstrated ones. That's what makes a good, efficient mathematical theory. Where am I going with this? I'm not here to do epistemology of mathematics, but in Euclid, there's his vocabulary. In his time, he doesn't yet call these axioms or postulates, he calls them demands. There's a democratic side to that term that I really like.
1:12:26 Because a demand is addressed to someone. It's not a soliloquy of someone with something that would be the triangle, the magnitude, the number, or parity or non-parity. It's addressed to someone. I ask my interlocutor to grant me — otherwise we can't continue — that through a point, only one parallel can be drawn to a line in the same plane. There. If you grant me that, I'll be able to demonstrate everything else. Everything else, meaning Euclid's geometry, not the whole of mathematics. You know, but it's not our topic that this postulate became a special case in the 20th century in non-Euclidean geometry.
The absolute power of understanding 1:13:02 There. But that's not our subject today. So, Kant undertook this enormous effort of saying: sensibility receives head-on, at the first contact with the real, the entire manifold of the sensible — to speak in Kantian terms, that is, that with which we can be in relation only through the senses, that's what the sensible is. I insist on this, sensible, intelligible, in Plato as in Kant, means precisely — the 'only' matters — what can only be perceived by the senses, just as the intelligible is not what I can think, because I can think all sorts of things, including the ivy in front of me, which is also sensible.
1:13:36 But it's what can only be thought, never seen nor heard. For example, I make circles in the water, they are sensible, I see them, the circles. But on the other hand, the notion of a mathematical circle is not visible. That doesn't mean it's mysterious — again, it's perfectly exoteric. The locus of points equidistant from a single point called the center, in the same plane — that's a clear definition of the circle. But that circle, the mathematicians' circle, you will never be able to touch it with your fingers, right? Because it's made of points, and a point — an atom is gigantic next to a point, it's even infinitely large next to a point.
1:14:08 And there, so, I mean, the intelligible is what can only be thought, not merely what can be thought, but what can only be thought. So, I return to the thread of this distinction between understanding and reason. Sensibility receives the manifold. Understanding classifies it by concept. That's a tree. That's a lizard. That's a house. And reason... Sorry. And the work of knowledge is finished for Kant.
1:14:38 The collaboration between sensibility and understanding produces knowledge. That's what he works out in his first major work, his masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason. How far can we go by having understanding collaborate with sensibility, which supplies the matter, still speaking as Kant does, and understanding, which gives form to that matter, the form of the concept. We're still not talking about reason. Precisely because in Kant, reason — and this is where we start leaving the understanding behind — adds to the cognitive aim of the understanding a practical aim in the Kantian sense.
1:15:16 I wouldn't want there to be a misunderstanding, because I could just as well have said moral. Whereas in our language today, practical and moral aren't quite the same semantic field. But reason in Kant is closer to the adjective 'reasonable' than to the adjective 'rational.' It presupposes someone pursuing a goal and arranging all his means according to that goal. That's reason. It's more a faculty that guides action than knowledge. Understanding and sensibility suffice for carrying out the work of knowledge.
1:15:48 And even Kant, as is well known in the history of thought, in a certain sense humiliates reason. Kant's whole work consisted precisely in showing the limits of reason. When Kant says 'I wanted to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith,' for belief — in German it's the same word — Glauben, he shows clearly what that means. He shows clearly the illusion into which reason falls when it believes it can escape the constraints of understanding and sensibility. But this reason, humiliated in knowledge, Kant rehabilitates in action.
1:16:21 On the other hand, when it comes to knowing whether what I do is good or bad, and no longer whether what I say is true or false — so we're no longer dealing with knowledge but with the philosophy of action — there reason regains its full role and its superiority over understanding. It is, as Kant says, the faculty of ends, of the things one pursues. There, I don't know if I've answered your question precisely enough, but... in Hegel. So, Hegel takes up this distinction, and that's where a modification is needed, except that between Kant and Hegel, in the meantime, the Romantic generation discredited the understanding for all the reasons I've just given.
1:16:54 Schiller, for example, speaks of the dreary empire of the concept. The dreary empire, as if in the concept everything were gray, everything resembled everything else, whereas in real life, in concrete life, things have a diversity, a color, a flavor that the abstraction of the concept lets slip away. And so, in this preface, Hegel is going to rehabilitate — it's a way of bringing back Kant and Fichte, who extends Kant's effort to his own generation — he is going to rehabilitate this work of concepts, of words, against the stupefied or ecstatic silence of the Romantics.
1:17:37 And I'll read you this famous passage, this celebrated rehabilitation of the understanding. The activity of dividing — he's alluding here to what's called analysis, whether in chemistry, medicine, anatomy, I mean, we start by dividing when we're having trouble finding our way, into constituent elements. The activity of dividing is the strength and the labor — and he underlines this — of the understanding. Underline it.
1:18:07 That is, of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of the absolute power. The rehabilitation is grandiose. The understanding is the absolute power. The circle that rests closed in on itself and that, as substance, holds together all its moments, is the immediate relation which arouses no wonder. But that the accident as such, separated from its surroundings — that which is bound and effectively real only in its connection with something else — should attain a being-there of its own and a distinct freedom, that is the prodigious power of the negative.
1:18:39 The energy of thought, of the pure I — and he continues: death, if we want to call this unreality by that name, is the most dreadful thing, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Beauty without strength — there he sums it all up. There he is summing up everything happening in the Romantic generation. Beauty without strength hates the understanding, because the understanding demands of it, of beauty, what it is not capable of accomplishing. It is not this life, the beauty that recoils in horror from death and keeps itself pure of destruction, but the life that endures death and maintains itself in death itself, which is the true life of the spirit.
Distinguishing without separating: the good abstraction 1:19:13 I'll finish. This extract ends with this striking sentence: the spirit wins its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. The understanding is this dismemberment, this work of analysis, of difficulties. At the beginning — anyone who has read Piaget, in genetic psychology, will find this very familiar. The child is in a kind of syncretism. That's a term one often saw in Piaget. The child, quite often, doesn't even distinguish between the outside world and himself. He does so a bit more once he's gone around his crib, once he's bumped into or collided with the outside world.
1:19:44 When he has been weaned from his mother's breast, for example, he notices that the world is not entirely absorbable by him and that there is nevertheless a distinction between object and subject. That's annoying, but that's how it is, he'll have to get used to it. These are all the little or big traumas that constitute us as the human beings we are. And so the evolution of an individual generally goes from the undifferentiated toward the differentiated. I could have taken as another example everything that goes from the seed to the example of the oak and the acorn, Hegel says somewhere.
1:20:16 We don't take a nap in the shade of an acorn. Even though the acorn contains in itself — in itself, remember what that means — all oaks are already there in potentiality. Yes, of course, in itself, yes, but not for itself. We don't take our nap in the shade of an acorn. Still. So this picks up what I said earlier about the embryo, which is indeed in itself a human being but is not for itself if it hasn't been educated. The understanding, then, is this moment when precisely we divide, when we highlight difference in relation to identity.
1:20:46 Let me take an example, I'll take this ashtray. I begin by distinguishing — this is common, we've done it since ancient philosophy — matter and form. A common opposition, in someone like Aristotle, for instance, it's fundamental, in Aristotle. Matter, the hyle, is what he calls, in German, Holz, wood, Madeira in Portuguese, wood, because apparently there's a lot of forest on Madeira. The form, round, for example, circular here, and the matter, let's say, kaolin, it's nothing, earth, to make pottery.
1:21:16 With the same amount of clay, with the same matter, instead of making an ashtray I could have made a bowl, which would not have had the same concept, not the same designation, not the same name. You see? So it's very good to distinguish them, we clearly see it's not the same thing, since with the same matter one can make something entirely different from an ashtray, one can make a vase, a bowl, whatever you like. So each of us here easily distinguishes matter from form. Yes, we've distinguished them, but we haven't separated them. I cannot hold in my left hand, here, the matter, the form, and here, the round form, the perfect circle, and the ashtray would be the fusion of the two.
1:21:55 We never have the two in a separated state. We can distinguish them in our minds, but in reality, they are absolutely not separable. It's Aristotle who taught us this admirable distinction — I hope we're not mixing things up here — between distinguishing and separating. We can distinguish in thought or in words, while remaining well aware that in reality this is not separable. That's important, to be fair to people, all the same. And so, through analysis, the work of understanding, I can say that in this ashtray there is indeed the form, which has nothing to do with the matter, which is clearly distinguished.
1:22:33 The roundness, I can find it elsewhere than in an ashtray, and the pottery clay — in that I can make something entirely other than an ashtray. Very good. But in reality, it is not separated. I dwelt a bit on the ashtray to help make sense of this passage, which must have seemed a bit difficult and abstract to you, but which now seems much clearer. That the accidental as such, separated from its surroundings — that which is bound and effectively real only in its connection with something else — the matter here and the form there, you see, should attain a being-there of its own and a distinct freedom, that is the prodigious power of the negative, the energy of thought and of the pure I.
1:23:10 Here, Hegel is praising good abstraction as opposed to the one he more often denounces, bad abstraction. Good abstraction is precisely the one that manages to distinguish through thought, knowing that in reality it isn't so, but to isolate through — that's what abstracting is, isolating a determination through thought, understood as isolating what in reality cannot be isolated. That is the prodigious power, and even the absolute power, as he says — it's rather solemn — of the understanding. There's a strong rehabilitation here against the Romantics, who reproached the understanding for having plunged us into Romantic unhappiness.
1:23:43 There was real resentment — that's a term Nietzsche will use with great discernment when he speaks of the philosophy of ressentiment. In the Romantic there is a great deal of resentment against the work carried out by understanding and reason. There, I hope I've more or less answered your question. I think, I believe, in the Logic: understanding determines and holds firmly to its determination; reason dissociates and nullifies the determinations of understanding, it rises to the universal in which it recognizes the particular.
1:24:13 That's a sentence entirely appropriate to what I'm saying, but I didn't want to quote it because in the Logic... But when doesn't he say that? No, but in the Logic precisely, what you're saying is perfectly true, but it sounds abstract. Agreed. It sounds abstract because those words aren't spelled out, of course. But indeed, in the text he just quoted, Hegel rehabilitates reason. I am rehabilitating understanding. But it's Verstand and not Vernunft. That is, this faculty at work in anyone who is...
1:24:44 It's the equivalent of what Descartes calls good sense. If Descartes begins the Discourse on Method by saying that it's present in every single person, since he says... There was a lot of mischief in it. You know, that most famous opening line: good sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world. And then he says clearly, good sense or the faculty of distinguishing the true from the false. That's the understanding. That is, apart from a few truly pathological cases, thankfully very rare and statistically marginal, I mean, any brain, however crude or slow, understands that if Peter is Paul's brother, then Paul is Peter's brother.
1:25:17 That if A equals B, B equals A. That if A is before B, B is after A, etc. So I mean, this is consubstantial with the human understanding, precisely. And so this faculty of dividing, of distinguishing, is a necessary precondition, but reason will then have to recompose all of that, precisely. There, so I thank you for your question because it's crucial to avoid misreadings of Hegel, because sometimes we pull our hair out, we get the impression, depending on this or that page, that Hegel speaks ill of the understanding, and then suddenly he speaks well of it.
1:25:50 Because precisely the understanding is itself this moment of ambivalence. As it is pure abstraction, it is a bit like money, which has neither smell nor taste — we say money has no smell. And it can serve the worst as well as the best. In other words, it is indeed the moment — I'll put it in terms of understanding — here the moment of the medium of understanding. It's no accident, moreover, that it's the world of words, of language and of the concept of understanding, in contrast to sensation, which is silent. It is a necessary moment.
Bud, flower, fruit: philosophical systems as moments 1:26:23 As you say, it's only a moment, and the ONLY mustn't be reductive. It's a moment that can't be eluded. Speaking of moments that can't be eluded, that's what makes for the whole originality – and we're getting to this now, a bit, following the thread of the subject – the originality of Hegel's approach compared to all his predecessors and compared to most of those who followed. It's that Hegel isn't just one more philosophy that comes to add itself to the others in some kind of debate of opinion, once again, like at the corner café. Let me give you this passage, which is significant. The more rigidly the common way of thinking – so opinion, and there we are at the corner café – the more rigidly the common way of thinking conceives the mutual opposition of the true and the false, the more it – opinion – is accustomed to expect, when taking a position with regard to a given philosophical system, either agreement or contradiction.
1:27:14 And in taking such a position, it knows only how to see one or the other. So, are you for or against Kant? Are you for or against Nietzsche? That's how opinion talks. It doesn't conceive – and here we get right to your remark – it doesn't conceive of the diversity of philosophical systems, say from Plato down to us, for example, as – I quote, it's a nice formula – the progressive development of truth. It sees, rather, only the contradiction in this diversity. Look, Plato and Aristotle don't agree. Ah, so philosophy, they know nothing, it's an arena – it's an image of Kant's – where no one ever gets the upper hand.
1:27:48 Yes it does, says Hegel. And he gives this famous example: the bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom. It's true that when the flower appears, the bud bursts open. And one might think that the flower is the truth of the plant. But no, the bud was not just a moment – to use a fine expression, 'moment,' which is one of the most Hegelian terms there is, borrowed from physics, by the way. So the bud is a moment that disappears into the flower, and the flower might think that it is the truth of the plant.
1:28:19 Ah, but no, not at all, because the flower's petals are going to fall, and it will appear to it, just as it has appeared to all of us at some stage of our lives, that what we thought was definitive is only a stage. Right? And it's the fruit which, as Hegel says, comes to replace the flower as its truth. Right? So the bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one could say the same of the different stages of the plant with respect to the debate between philosophical systems. But instead of opposing them by saying one is right and the other wrong, he speaks of them as moments, each of which is necessary.
1:28:50 We cannot skip over Aristotle, or Kant, or this or that. We cannot skip over them because each is constitutive of the truth. So Hegelianism is not one more philosophy added to the others, further muddying an already rather muddled dossier – that of philosophical thought since its very beginnings. On the contrary, it is good news: everyone told the truth, but not at the same moment. Not at the same moment in the history of humanity. So I'm going to quote this passage in full, so as not to repeat the same formulas from Hegel a thousand times.
1:29:22 I'll take it up again from the beginning, and this time I'll go all the way to the end. The more rigidly the common way of thinking conceives the mutual opposition of the true and the false, the more it is accustomed to expect, when taking a position with regard to a given philosophical system, either agreement or contradiction. And in taking such a position, it knows only how to see one or the other. Opinion, again, does not conceive of the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive development of truth. It sees, rather, only the contradiction in this diversity.
1:29:52 Yet the bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one could say that the bud is refuted by the flower. Likewise, at the appearance of the fruit, the flower is denounced as a false existence of the plant, and the fruit comes to replace the flower as its truth. And here he adds – if you hadn't said it, I'll go on now – these forms are not merely distinct, the bud, the flower, the fruit. They are not merely distinct, but they are mutually incompatible. You don't have, on the same plant, at the same time, both the flower there and the fruit there, or the bud there and the flower that comes out of it.
1:30:22 And you see, temporality is quite visible in Hegel, who will go on to arrive at the philosophy of history. These forms are not merely distinct, but moreover each drives out the other because they are mutually incompatible. They cannot exist simultaneously. But at the same time, their fluid nature – the flower, the bud, and so on – they are not stages, as everyone believes, but fluids. But their fluid nature makes them moments – there's your notion, thank you for bringing it up – of an organic unity in which they don't merely repel each other, but in which – a crucial sentence – one is just as necessary as the other.
1:30:57 Good news, Hegel, whatever text or writing you like. Indeed, it's often been said that when you start criticizing or refuting Hegel, you're writing a page of Hegelianism. You realize that somewhere in Hegel there's a page for that too – of course, that's the moment of skepticism, or conversely of dogmatism, which are constitutive moments of all thought. We've all gone through a stage where, to the question 'What's my father's finest car?' we'd answer '504 Peugeot,' of course – why? Because it's my father's. At primary school, that's how it was. They were furious to see that the kid across the way didn't say that at all, said the Renault R16 instead – why? Because it's my father's. Same argument on both sides – 'because it's my father's.'
1:31:29 That's the dogmatic stage we've all gone through, in our childhood, when we were children, when the answers, so to speak, precede the questions. A happy stage. And then, it's a bit like when you look for the criterion of beauty, you say, what is beauty? Well, here – it's the Parthenon, it's the Venus de Milo – and then afterward, that's for someone who hasn't traveled much, a bit like my child earlier, someone who's never left the neighborhood; whereas someone who's knocked about a bit, that's not it at all – among the Hottentots they prefer steatopygous women to the Venus de Milo.
1:32:03 Well, there it is – it's a stage, a somewhat more developed moment, that of relativist skepticism, which presupposes that one has traveled, moved around, matured a bit; it's not yet the truth, because relativism is still far from truth. But still, it's progress compared to someone who, so to speak, saw noon at his own doorstep. So let me finish this paragraph: but at the same time, their fluid nature makes them moments – the bud, the flower, the fruit – of the organic unity in which they don't merely repel each other, but in which one is just as necessary, which alone constitutes the life of the whole – the life, what makes it a living, organic whole, like a plant – precisely because each of these stages is necessary.
1:32:43 Whereas in a pile of stones, I can remove one stone from the pile, and it remains a pile of stones. The stone is composed of parts, of elements; it's a mechanical whole and not an organic whole – you can see it clearly there, where the parts aren't necessary to the whole, right? Whereas if you try to extract just my brain from me, there's not much left of me. There you go. The difference between a mechanical whole and an organic whole is that in the organic whole – which Hegel is speaking of here, and that's the case for plants, and a fortiori philosophical systems are not just that – in an organic whole, the whole is immanent in each part.
1:33:21 Don't forget that he was educated at the end of the 18th century, it's the era of Buffon, and Buffon is one of the first to notice, to perceive certain principles that will lead to transformism, to the theory of evolution – that from a dinosaur's tooth, even though you only have the part, you can decide whether that dinosaur was herbivorous or carnivorous based on the shape of the tooth, based on the wear it has undergone, etc. – this proves that, unlike the pile of stones, where you can't reconstruct the pile from one of the stones you extracted, you can do so in the case of living beings, because the whole is somehow immanent in each part.
1:34:00 And yes, if it has a pointed tooth like this, it's carnivorous, made for tearing, and if it has a flat one, for grinding, then it has, say, a stomach like a cow's, made of several chambers, and so on. The big difference is that, in the totality we're dealing with – and this is the case for philosophical systems – the whole is present in each part. So, by contrast, contradiction with regard to a philosophical system is not usually conceived in this way. So it seems obvious, what I've just said about the plant, but why don't we apply it, says Hegel, to philosophical discussions?
1:34:34 And consciousness, grasping this contradiction – between Plato and Aristotle, say – doesn't know how to free it, or to keep it free of its one-sidedness, and so, in what appears in the form of a struggle against itself. That's very Hegel. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, all of that consists of struggles of the self with itself, movements of the self – and not of the ego. Thus, in what appears in the form of a struggle against itself, consciousness fails to recognize moments that are reciprocally necessary. Reciprocally necessary. It's hard to be more democratic than that.
1:35:05 That's why I thank you for raising the notion of moment, which is crucial. Let me note in passing, and I'll finish after that because I don't want to dwell too long on each question and leave room for others, that the notion of moment, in physics this time, in the field from which Hegel took it – when he uses it, he takes it from a field, you know, when you make a metaphor, it always has an origin. 'Metaphor' has a geographical origin; 'revolution,' astronomical – the astronomical revolution of the stars, before it was political. Well, when he took the notion of moment from physics, which wasn't so old at that time, which was reaching its zenith, which began with Galileo, scientific physics, and which culminates in that era, of course, with Newton.
1:35:50 Now, in Newton, what is the notion of moment? It's a couple of forces – look how dialectical it already is. Take a door handle: one arrow going to the right, another going to the left, like this. So, two forces of equal intensity and opposite direction, exactly. We're right in the middle of dialectics. Are there other questions? Which page was that? That was interesting. In the Hyppolite translation, page 6. And the other one? The big passage you mentioned?
1:36:21 Yes, page 6. No, but before – reason, inside, a section more... Before, before you turn the page. The flower, turn... Yes, but that's it. It's page 6. No, but that one was all in red. That was much later. Much later. On the understanding, then. There, all right, that's how much? Wait, 10 minutes. It's all in red. That one's even later. It's all there in red. There, yes, 29.
1:36:51 When I'm lost among the three different translations, I get all tangled up. Yes? Yes, regarding the difficulty you mentioned earlier about understanding, reading, deciphering Hegel – could that actually be a matter of translation? Is it clearer in German? I'll start by... I would have thought you were going to say – I can't help quoting it – when Goethe came across a translation, the translation of his Faust by Gérard de Nerval, who translated it at 19, even though, given your question over there, he knew German only approximately, it took some nerve.
1:37:30 Goethe said, oh my, this translation is so beautiful, I can no longer read Faust in German. That was said as a joke. But no, no, no, even Germanists find it complicated, of course. It's as complicated as the language of knowledge in general is complicated compared to the language of opinion. I myself try to find my way a little in this labyrinth, but still, I mean, I couldn't sit through a page and a half of soil mechanics, that's not my field. Knowledge in general, compared to opinion, when you don't have the code – but the difference is that it's transmissible, it's attainable and transmissible for everyone and valid for all.
1:38:08 Knowledge always has a somewhat complex side to it. It's the strenuous effort of the concept. Was it Hegel's intention to be didactic? Absolutely. But I'll come back to that, and I'll show it. We'll try to pin down – we'll take a passage that seems totally incomprehensible, to speak like young people, and try to see in what way it is, because we'll see that it doesn't hold up, vocabulary that is actually quite ordinary. But I'm not going to do that now, because I think a break is called for.
Tübingen, the tree of liberty, and the Romantic suicides 1:38:39 Earlier I made a little digression on the esoteric-exoteric opposition. Knowledge, so to speak, reserved for a few, esoteric, under the seal of mystery and accessible only to certain initiates – that's the case of just about every sect – and exoteric, like a publication on liquid-fuel propulsion in rockets, for instance – that's exoteric.
1:39:15 And it's a difference that's less innocent than one might think. And earlier I made a small allusion, allowing myself a little analogy between the prestige of the esoteric and mystery in terms of knowledge. Again, that there can be an esoteric prestige with music, a painting, that it only takes on its full value through a resonance of mystery or strangeness – there's no criticism to be made of that.
1:39:47 For a form of knowledge that is meant to be communicated, though, it's quite different. And so I was proposing, earlier, a republican mode of knowledge – that is, transmissible, exoteric, communicable, determinate – as against the false prestige of mystery in knowledge. And again, mystery is perfectly defensible in other domains than that of knowledge, such as art, for instance. It's a difference, again, less innocent than it seems, because I linked it earlier – I made an analogy – between esotericism and the so-called mentality of scarcity.
1:40:25 When there isn't enough for everyone, well, one hides, doesn't one, what is precious. That's roughly where I'm going to pick back up, coming back to the genesis of the Hegelian system, which didn't just fall from the sky like that, and coming back to the relationship Hegel maintains with the first part of his journey – that is, his romantic moment, romantically speaking, that is, where the absolute is considered attainable only through intuition and in an aesthetic mode, and not in the rational mode of the explicit concept, etc.
1:41:15 And for that, I'm going to draw on one of his companions – I'm thinking of the poet Hölderlin – to extend a little the text I barely began earlier, 'At the Source of the Danube.' It's still... it strikes me strangely to realize that the two greatest philosophers of their time and the greatest poets of that time, Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, found themselves as three students in the same digs, so to speak, at the Stift, the theology seminary in Tübingen.
1:41:49 For from a socio-professional point of view, if I may apply that category to these young men, what was it? In the Germany of that time, the only chance for an intellectual to have any kind of career was to study theology and become a pastor. That was the only socio-professional outlet for these intellectuals, and so all three found themselves pushed by their parents. A well-meaning mother telling her son: my son, you must go into the pastorate, you'll be paid, you'll have job security.
1:42:21 And for that, you had to study theology – you know, philosophia ancilla theologiae, philosophy the handmaid of theology, as they said in the Middle Ages. So we shouldn't be too surprised that all these young men began their studies with theology before moving on to philosophy and, a fortiori, everything else. And so I found them all three together in this seminary in Tübingen, right at the very moment when the events in France were taking place.
1:42:52 One can't imagine the impact this could have in that... Picture eternal Germany, a little square with a little well in the middle, quiet little houses like the Smurfs, or like Snow White, whichever you like, half-timbered houses with geraniums in the windows. And boom, all of a sudden, the storming of the Bastille. Well, an example of the emotion this stirred up in the German milieu regarding the French events is the case of Kant. These are well-known anecdotes for some, but I'll recall them anyway. You see, it's easy to caricature Kant, though he doesn't deserve it.
1:43:23 But still, on one point at least: that famous little walk – a maniac, we'd say today, I don't know – so well regulated, thoroughly Protestant, who took his little walk every day up to a certain point, no closer, no farther, then back, and to work, to the library. He even had handkerchiefs, a whole system of strings hung from the ceiling with handkerchiefs at the end so as not to waste time looking for them – he just had to grab one. You see, that was how organized Kant was. And well, twice in his life, he went beyond the usual distance of his walk.
1:43:54 He transgressed. The first time was to be the first to hear news of the storming of the Bastille, through the gazettes, and the second time was for the first German translation of Rousseau's Social Contract. You see the importance of the resonance of French events for these young intellectuals. And Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, who were all twenty at the time, decided on July 14, 1790 – so on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille – to plant, which was quite a provocation for the time, given the rigorous discipline of universities in general and theology in particular, to plant a liberty tree in the middle of the courtyard of the Stift in Tübingen, no less.
1:44:34 You see, this shows this dialogue between – as I said earlier – the French Enlightenment versus the night of German Romanticism; I mean, it's not an abstract opposition. So how to explain the path by which Hegel escaped this hecatomb I alluded to earlier in the first part of the talk – this hecatomb which saw Novalis die at 29, Wackenroder at 24, Kleist commit suicide at 35 with his companion. Let me open a parenthesis for Kleist: of all the German Romantics, he's the one who succeeded best in the theater.
1:45:09 And Gérard Philipe immortalized him through a play like The Prince of Homburg, for instance, from that circle. And Planchon had staged it at the time, at the TNP. And Kleist killed himself with his companion in a small inn on the shores of the Wannsee in Berlin. And the innkeeper recounts that they arrived laughing like children. They asked for coffee to be served outside. He says it surprised him because it was actually quite cold. And then, bang, bang, two shots – there you have it, they arrived cheerful, like a strange generation, as I said earlier.
1:45:43 Well, in our case, we have the equivalent with Nerval. It's a bit offset since it's a generation later chronologically. But Nerval does both: he goes mad, and he kills himself. That makes him... doubly a German Romantic, in that sense. And let's not forget he made his name as the French translator of Faust into German – I mean French, of Faust – so he's a kind of go-between from Germany to France and vice versa. For those who know him better, there's Heinrich Heine, and for those who don't know him, let me say that's a shame, because he's someone very much in tune with our era, by the way.
Hölderlin and the West, land of death 1:46:18 Heine, who had, by the way, attended Hegel's lectures at the university – Heine is exactly the counterpart of Nerval in that respect. Heine is the most French of German authors, and Nerval is the most German of French authors. There, I'll close that parenthesis. Let me come back to our friend Hölderlin, above all Hegel's friend, and try to see, through one of his poems, what they suffered from, why they sank into madness, into suicide, why there was this hecatomb I was alluding to.
1:46:52 And you'll see that the first surprise is that it was less misfortune that struck them than an excess of enjoyment. Happiness, if you prefer. For now, the distinction doesn't matter much. And I'll take up again the poem I mentioned earlier, called 'At the Source of the Danube.' Let me remind you that the Danube rises in the Black Forest and flows into the Black Sea. So it goes somewhat from West to East. That struck the poet, of course, as history in reverse.
1:47:24 And when he says this, I recall the beautiful passage where he compares it to organ music that suddenly resounds like that within the sacred precinct, as he says: 'thus, like the organ in sonorous and splendid chords, within the sacred enclosure, high above, pure, they spring forth from the inexhaustible pipes, sounding the awakening. Thus begins the morning prelude, and now, from hall to hall, far off, in a sheet of coolness, the melodious river pours forth, and, little by little, fills with enthusiasm the whole dwelling in its fold of icy shadow.'
1:48:03 And here it is born, then – behold what rises toward the sun of the feast, and the voices of the faithful answer it in chorus. Such it came – he's always comparing before comparing, in Hölderlin. 'Such came from the Orient to us the word.' So even in the mature Hegel – here I'm in the older Berlin Hegel, with the system all worked out. There you have it: history begins in the Orient, that is, in the morning, passes at midday over Greece, and sets in the West, at our place. What does 'Occident' mean? I'm deliberately raising a concept that's never used as a concept but almost always as a representation.
1:48:38 People say, 'Westerners are scandalized by Russia's behavior in the Syrian affair.' Fine, that's what 'Westerners' means. So you might say, the first answer is: those who are in the West, no pun intended. That is, well, since we know the Earth is round, it's rather annoying, because whoever wants can be in the West. Poland is west of Russia, but east of Germany. Right? So what are these notions, then? That's where we see that at the outset, they aren't concepts at all – they're representations.
1:49:09 There are concepts made to make something known – a camera, a tree, a bird – and concepts made not to reveal but to conceal. The concept of 'Occident' is one of them. Let's try to see what it's hiding anyway. So we clearly see it doesn't mean 'West,' because the West is wherever you want it to be. So what is it, then? Ah, well, yes, it's the European countries – no, wait, that doesn't work either, so the United States isn't a leader of the West? Ah, so no, that doesn't work, and the European countries don't work either, that's getting more and more awkward. Well, let's say it's the industrialized countries – Japan is part of the West.
1:49:41 That doesn't work either. To avoid saying capitalist countries, I mean there are ugly words, disagreeable ones, one mustn't say them. That's called an occulting concept, Occident. It's a concept that doesn't serve to designate something but on the contrary to not name it, to not make it explicit, and to keep passing it over in silence. That's roughly the role of the media in the world we live in, to use notions that make nothing explicit but prolong the misunderstandings. So when Hegel says history begins in the Orient, passes through the South above Greece, and sets in the Occident, transforming these representations into a concept so as not to fall into the traps I've just denounced.
1:50:21 That means you can see it in units of time, morning, noon, evening. Evening is the moment when the sun declines, Occident notably, 'je l'ai occis,' what does that mean? It means I killed him, in the old language, I killed him with my sword, I killed the Occident. It's the land of death, we are Occidentals, we are in the land of death, we are where the sun sets. It's no accident that there was this hecatomb of German romantics, that's what we're going to try to explain, and we'll see, we're going to try not to leave death in that abstraction—an abstract death isn't very dangerous—but try to give it some content all the same. So if I extend this text a little, I continue: 'Thus comes the word from the Orient to us, and against the rocks of Parnassus, on the flank of Cithaeron, O Asia, I hear the echo come from you, and it breaks against the Capitol, and having vertiginously descended from the Alps, it comes to us as a stranger'—this translation annoys me, I'll take another one because there's a much better one for this, I need it, thank you—so, I'll pick up the passage on the organ.
1:51:32 and I continue thus: as from up there the rich and powerful harmonies of the organ, in the sacred hall, in pure streaming from its inexhaustible pipes, the awakening prelude begins in the morning and grows louder from gallery to gallery, and now the vivifying melodic river flows down even to the icy shadows, and fervor fills the house everywhere, and then awakened now, it rises now, it answers the sun of the feast, the heart of the assembly—thus the word comes from the Orient to us, and on the rocks of Parnassus and on Cithaeron I hear it, O Asia, the echo come from you, it breaks against the Capitol, and now suddenly precipitated from the height of the Alps—what stages remain: the Orient, India for example, noon Greece, then the Capitol, so Rome, in Hegelian terms we've passed from the ethical world, Greece, to the empire of law, the Roman world, and crossing the Alps they arrive in Western Europe—and now suddenly precipitated from the height of the Alps, it comes to us as a stranger—who?
1:52:26 the awakener, the shaping voice of man, a stupor—now we're beginning to answer the question about death, what is the Occident?—a stupor then, foreign, and the soul of all those it had reached; I think it has rarely been made as explicit as in this last line, the evil that struck this era—a stupor then, foreign, and the soul of all those it had reached, and night fell upon the eyes of the best—we have the opposite of the Enlightenment—and night fell upon the eyes of the best. I quoted the Hymns to the Night by Novalis a moment ago, that's not by chance—for great is man's power, and with his art he tames the flood, the rock, and the force of fire—a paraphrase of Sophocles—and bearing the sword of noblest thought, he does not fear it—so man has all these powers, but before the divine, the strongest is struck down—and it's almost, this is why I want to extend this—he resembles the game animal that youth's sweetness drives on, running tirelessly over the mountains, feeling its own strength in the high heat of noon—there's the roebuck deep in the black forest at noon—but when it declines—there's the Occident—but when the sacred light declines amid playful breezes and with the cooling ray.
Ambiguous Adventure: science as a barricade 1:53:36 the spirit of joy descends to touch the blessed earth—the spirit of joy, it's not the plague that came after all—the spirit of joy descends to touch the blessed earth, then he, the game animal, then he succumbs, and so much beauty overwhelms him, and he falls into a waking sleep. There, in Hölderlin's manner, is how this hecatomb was explained—I repeat this word, this catastrophe that befell a generation—a psychic catastrophe, if I may say so, but I don't like saying 'psychic' too much because that tends to enclose it within the field of what in the 1960s was rightly denounced as the psychologistic reduction, in Husserl for example, insofar as when something strikes an entire generation, with individuals as different from one another as could be, we are beyond problems of individuals—here it's truly a whole moment, a moment of history that was struck. So we're going to try—I quoted this to show that we mustn't forget that the Enlightenment came before, and what the Enlightenment fought against most, consciously or not, was the religious bond which for millennia had allowed man to find some kind of balance with the problems that overwhelmed him. And here I'm going to quote, to make myself understood—
1:54:47 Hegel—there's a whole file on Hegel and Africa, a text by an African author drawn from a beautiful novel that I recommend to you, that high schoolers and Africans know well, it's part of their classics, called Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, a Senegalese author. I'll go through the plot of the novel very quickly—it's somewhat the journey of a young Senegalese caught, like many of his compatriots, between two cultures, that of his origins and that of the colonizer. Very quickly, the novel is worth more than all these abstractions anyway. At one point there's a discussion between the boy's father—the father of the young Senegalese who is the book's hero—and the father of his French friend whom he attends French school with, of course. And in the chapter before the one I'm going to read you, there's a meeting of the traditional Senegalese, at the moment the white men have just landed, to decide whether to send our children to the new school.
1:55:57 and the discussion around the palaver tree—do we send our children or not to the new school—the discussion is precise, that's what it's about, and the one most opposed to the invaders, the one who is most untamable, called the Grande Royale of the Diallobé, is very hostile toward the newcomers, and yet it is she who decides during the meeting to send the children to the new school. And the author says—I'll skip this but summarize the essential—she had understood that the strength of the newcomers did not lie in the cannons but in what came behind those cannons: the books, the school manuals, knowledge, technique, and that if one wanted to get rid of them, one had to be initiated into that, to acquire their strength. So, I'll read this to you—there's a discussion between a good Frenchman, the father of a friend of our hero, and the father of the hero, so we're clear—the old Senegalese who speaks is called here in the text 'the Knight,' he is a noble castellan among his people, the Knight who is speaking with Monsieur Lacroix, and it's a dialogue.
1:57:07 fairly classic, between someone who defends rationality—the Frenchman, debate, science, technique, etc.—and the Senegalese who tells him that this rationality risks threatening properly human values. And so you see, I read what I just said—as the discussion takes place at dusk, one must have seen these Sahel dusks to understand how they are among the most beautiful in the world—'Does this dusk not trouble you? For my part it overwhelms me. Right now it seems to me closer to the end of the world than to night.' The Knight—that's the little Senegalese boy's father—the Knight smiles: 'Rest assured, I predict a peaceful night.' 'You don't believe in the end of the world?' 'On the contrary, I hope for it firmly.' 'That's just what I thought'—each has his own inner monologue—'That's just what I thought,' said the Frenchman. 'Here everyone believes in the end of the world, from the crudest peasant to the most cultivated men. Why? I wondered. Only today have I begun to understand, looking at this dusk.' The Knight looked at him: 'My turn to ask you—you don't really believe in the end of the world?' 'No, obviously,' said the Frenchman, 'the world will have no end—'
1:58:17 —at least not the end one expects here, a catastrophe of our planet. 'I don't say that,' our crudest peasant replied, said Monsieur Lacroix, 'I don't believe in that episodic and accidental end. Our universe does not admit of accident, it is more reassuring than yours despite appearances.' 'Perhaps,' the Frenchman answered, 'unfortunately for us it is my universe that is true. The earth is not flat, it has no edge overlooking an abyss, the sun is not a lamp fixed on a dome of blue porcelain. The universe science has revealed to the Occident is less immediately human, but admit it is more solid.' Answer: 'Your science has revealed to you a round and perfect world of infinite motion. It has reconquered ground from chaos, but I believe it has thereby opened you to despair.' A fairly classic discussion for now, the misdeeds and benefits of civilization—I don't know if it was only that, I couldn't help but make this detour—and now the Knight continues this line of thought, and we suddenly arrive there. There had been a moment of silence. Outside, the evening drama—I started from the Occident, we'll come to a sunset—outside, the evening drama had come to an end, the sun had fallen behind an imposing mass of scarlet clouds; the sky was collapsing after it like a monstrous trail of coagulated blood.
1:59:27 The red glow of the air had gradually softened under the slow invasion of shadow. Strange, Lacroix thought, this fascination that nothingness holds for those who have nothing—their nothingness, he calls it the absolute. He turns his back on the light, but he stares fixedly at the shadow—is this man not sensitive to his own poverty? At that moment the Knight's voice rose, low and meditative, as if he were speaking to himself: 'I wanted to tell you—but to me, sir?—he hesitated—I wanted to tell you, sir, I wanted to tell you that it is, it is I myself, after all, forgive me, who put my son in your school.' 'In turn you give me great joy.' 'I put my son in your school, and I prayed God to save us all, you and us.' 'He will save us, sir, if he exists.' 'I put my son in the school, and this is the most important thing—the most Hegelian thing—because the exterior, which you have arrested, was slowly invading us and destroying us. Teach him to arrest the exterior. You have arrested it, sir. The exterior is aggressive'—here he's speaking of nature—'if man does not conquer it, it destroys man and makes him a victim of tragedy. A wound one neglects does not heal but becomes infected, unto gangrene.'
2:00:37 'A child one does not educate regresses; a society one does not govern destroys itself. The Occident therefore erects science against this invading chaos; it erects it as a barricade.' That's the Knight, isn't it, that's an admirable dialogue, you see, this comes to us from Africa—it takes an African author to shame us, us ecologists, saying, oh, science isn't good, it will bring us more problems than solutions. You can't watch a documentary on television without someone saying, look at these men living in harmony with nature—yeah, right—in the interviews, each one, taken aside, and promised just a little more money than the show's producers gave him, will repeat anything at all in front of the camera. He would be the first to say he wants a transistor radio, that he should really have a car, and above all roads and schools and hospitals. I myself saw in Africa someone arrive at a dispensary after walking 14 km through the forest with his wife on his back because she had a difficult delivery. So it's not to them that we're going to say we are cynical consumers and that we live in an excess of goods. So it makes us a little ashamed that this should come to us from Africa, a word—you see, it's more than a discourse there—a word that tells us, despite everything it may have as a drawback—
Finitude, gestation, and qualitative leap 2:01:47 such as dehumanization, the world of invasive technology, which one might oppose—that it allowed us to stop the chaos that was invading and destroying us, and to build a barricade. So that's not a detour, believe me, we're right at the heart of the matter—what happened to this generation, on whose background Hegel's thought blossomed—what happened is not a psychological phenomenon, it is a historical necessity in which we are still implicated, namely: how to have a relation, at least balanced if not happy, at least balanced, to the world when we have suppressed—and this was the work of the Enlightenment, this suppression—all the subterfuges, artifices, or incantations that allowed us precisely to elude the most difficult thoughts, those that spoil the landscape—in particular that of death. That's why I wanted to get to this point, and I'm not speaking here of death in the abstract sense, some kind of death immanent to the living.
2:02:57 When someone like Claude Bernard, in the nineteenth century, who nonetheless founded biology, when someone can well say 'the living is the dead'—that's still a striking phrase, even if it's meant as a quip—it still means that we finally began to understand the living somewhat and to treat it, precisely from the moment we treat it on the basis of physico-chemical principles, and not as life, as some kind of mysterious essence that would be of a completely different order than inert matter. It is on the contrary since we take it as inert matter that we have an effective medicine—I'm not saying medicine is a science, medicine is an art, as doctors themselves say, but one that is only effective since it relies on a science, which is biology. So it's as if we had to wait until the last years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth—in short, the era that inaugurates our own, that of the industrial revolution in England, French politics moreover—which for the first time leaves man alone, face to face—I won't use the term death because it has connotations.
2:04:07 a bit—there's a tremor in the voice that would run counter to what I want to unfold here, one must try to rationalize, but let's say, finitude, as we say in philosophy—it took until that moment for man to resign himself to the concept of finitude, because until then he slid over his finitude, slid into pagan or Christian immortality, no matter. You have, moreover, an admirable passage in the preface to the Phenomenology where Hegel alludes to these changes, like apples—there was a time when men had a heaven endowed with vast treasures of thoughts and images. Then the meaning of everything that is was found in the thread of light attaching it to heaven—an allusion to the constellations of astrology, for example, if you want to know the truth about yourself, about a destiny, you look at the stars—then the meaning of everything that is was found in the thread of light attaching it to heaven; instead of dwelling in the presence of this world, the gaze slid beyond, toward the divine essence, toward, if one may say, a presence beyond the world. It was by constraint—
2:05:17 that the eye of spirit had to be brought back to the earthly and kept within the earthly. It took a long time before that clarity, which only the supra-terrestrial possessed, could be introduced into the narrowness and confusion in which the meaning of the here-below found itself—the opposite of the beyond—where the meaning of the here-below found itself, before an attention to what is present as such could be given value and interest—an attention that was then called experience. Now it seems we need the opposite: meaning is so rooted in the earthly that it seems an equal violence is needed to lift it up. An interesting passage which shows well that for millennia we slid over man's destiny by resolving it in a manner, let's say, magical. And a second historical allusion, moreover—it is not hard to see that our time—Hegel is alluding to his own era—is a time of gestation and transition. We are in the midst of a world crisis, as there are few—so there's a certain topicality here—our time is a time of gestation, of transition to a new period. Spirit has broken with the world of its previous existence and representation—there you see clearly what is meant, spirit for him is anything but a little vapor rising from one's head—spirit—
2:06:27 it is, roughly, universal history. Spirit has broken with the world of its previous existence and representation, which had governed it until now—what in history we broadly call the Ancien Régime. It is on the point of burying this world in the past, it is on the point of burying this world in the past, and it is at work transforming itself into truth. And here he explains: spirit is never in a state of rest—one might say, well, up to now nothing was happening, it was the Ancien Régime, there was a place for everything and everything in its place—I was talking recently about La Bruyère, you find this very well done in La Bruyère's Characters—one gets the impression that everyone is in a kind of eternity: the scatterbrain, the bird-catcher, begins with one bird and ends with a thousand, and it's no longer birdsong, it's a racket, with the bird-catcher—everyone is like that, in their little box, for eternity. It's a bit the world of baroque music, which is why it's so popular in our era—our era, uneasy, turns to baroque music to find again times that were surely no more secure, but as Nerval says, ignorance cannot be learned. So this old world is characterized by that, it is somewhat timeless.
2:07:37 it is caught up all the time in an eternity that makes us forget finitude and death, isn't it? And so Hegel is going to show, in this passage—I'll tell you beforehand so the text itself becomes clearer—he distinguishes evolution and revolution. One might think nothing had happened, that suddenly, all at once, the Bastille is stormed and there's a revolution—ah, no, says Hegel, there is revolution because there had never ceased to be evolution, only evolution is less perceptible than revolution. This is what I'll read you: 'In truth spirit is never in a state of rest but is always carried along in a movement of indefinite progress. Only here it is as in the case of the child'—an allusion to the embryo, as before—'after a long and silent nourishing in the mother's womb, after a long and silent nourishing, the first breath, in a qualitative leap, abruptly interrupts the continuity of merely quantitative growth'—the merely quantitative growth is that of the fetus, when nourishment passes by chemical processes from the mother—
2:08:47 to the newborn, of course, but in a continuous and silent manner—in a qualitative leap abruptly interrupts the continuity of merely quantitative growth, and it is only then that the child is born. Thus the spirit which is forming matures slowly and silently toward its new figure, disintegrates fragment by fragment the edifice of its previous world. He's giving a kind of historical summary of the process that preceded its own coming to consciousness. There was the eighteenth century—one could even hear this passage musically, as you'll see, we pass from Mozart to Beethoven—there is a continuous work of undermining, and Montesquieu, one of the first modern sociologists, begins to say that laws aren't so absurd. Pascal, in the previous century, had said: truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on the other—we see clearly the follies of humanity, it makes no sense. Ah no, says Montesquieu, it's quite normal, for example, that arson be punished more harshly in a dry country than in a humid one—there is a logic to laws, the human world isn't absurd. And in one of the most beautiful prefaces ever written, I recommend it to you, the preface to Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws—a beautiful preface which puts to shame Madame d'Épinay who could be witty, she had said—
2:09:57 'it's wit on the laws'—so, the preface to the Spirit of the Laws—and it's, sorry, Montesquieu begins with this fine sentence: 'When I set out to examine men, I believed they were not solely guided by their fancy.' He is one of the first to make us understand that the real is rational—men are not guided by their fancy, there are reasons why, beyond the Pyrenees, in Spain, justice is administered one way, and in France differently—there are reasons for it. And so this continuous work of undermining continued, which would require Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, who would attack the big target—religion after all—would attack religious belief. Oh, with Voltaire we're far from understanding religion, but at least we understand its misdeeds, which is not the same thing. Voltaire shows that it's an error, but he doesn't show in what way it's an error, because if it's a simple error, like 2 plus 2 equals 7, we don't understand why thousands of men, among the most intelligent in history, were so caught up in it. So there's all this work, but we're not yet at the French Revolution. Thus the spirit which is forming matures slowly and silently toward its new figure—
2:11:07 disintegrates fragment by fragment the edifice of this previous world. The shaking of this world—I continue—is only indicated by sporadic symptoms. Here is where we cannot help but hear Mozart's music—the frivolity and boredom that pervade those still subsisting, the vague presentiment of something unknown, are the harbingers of something else that is on its way. This continuous crumbling, which does not alter the overall physiognomy, is suddenly interrupted by the rising of the sun—there is Beethoven's Ode to Joy—is suddenly interrupted by the rising of the sun which, in a flash, decides at once the shape of the new world. You have a striking summary of the great stakes of that era, which are still ours. One does not cross such ordeals with impunity on the historical scale—to the point that I think—I tell you again dogmatically, I'd be told to argue it, but I say it to you flat out, if you can't do otherwise—it seems to me that since that era we continue to be marked by what determined it from its very emergence, namely the conflict between revolution and counter-revolution. We are not post-revolutionary—
Romanticism and the Parnasse, the end of history, and the Cold War 2:12:17 we are not counter-revolutionary—each of us has a choice, moreover—we are still within the conflict between revolution and counter-revolution. I'm going to try to illustrate this with references more familiar to those kind enough to be here. If I take it on the literary plane, you see the sequence that occurred from Hegel's era down to the literary avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, on whose stock we continue to live—I think, I don't know, at random, surrealism, lettrism—but everyone has the impression there's a succession of literary movements where one needs to be a specialist to find one's way—not at all, there's a fairly clear reading path if you look closely. There is an alternation of romantic moments—I'll start with the first—so, eccentric in the proper sense, moving away from the center, from daily life, from habit, toward the peripheries, toward the edges, toward the limits—in this sense, for example, surrealism is a romantic adventure at this level.
2:13:27 and it alternates with moments where, on the contrary, there is a return backward—I think, for example, all the literature textbooks know this well, it's the Parnasse in poetry that succeeds Romanticism—Parnasse, a return to formal perfection, to intelligibility, to references that are rather sculptural, marble-like, one used to say even, like marble statues, isn't that so. And so, to romantic warmth succeeds coldness, but the perfection of Parnassian marble—Banville or Gautier, for example—you need only look at Gautier's titles when he writes Émaux et Camées, plural of enamel, isn't it—Émaux et Camées, we are indeed in the register of the hard, the cold, but the well-crafted, the goldsmith's work. And well, neither one prevails over the other, the problem isn't solved, and we see clearly, as Hegel says, that both are moments as necessary as one another—as soon as one is immersed in one, it's the other that's missing. The subjective insufficiencies of the Romantic provoke the return of the Parnasse—we just saw that—but afterward it's Baudelaire who takes over, after the Parnasse there is a return to romantic sensibility.
2:14:37 enriched by the formal perfection that the Parnasse had brought back to the fore—it's an enrichment, we haven't eliminated the Romantic, but the Parnasse has been integrated into a broader whole. So whether one calls it Symbolism—among the literary movements, that is—Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, it's a moment, though it would have surprised them to be called Symbolists, well, in any case—what characterizes this moment, modern par excellence, since it's agreed to recognize the premises of twentieth-century avant-gardes—you know what Rimbaud said of Baudelaire: 'first of the seers, king of poets, a true god'—it's with him that things really begin—but Rimbaud adds—'but the form so praised in him is petty; this pitiless age is petty'—and Rimbaud saw fairly quickly that in Baudelaire the form is beautiful, but still it smells a bit—it's a bit the old classical or neoclassical form, not his own, which is stuck onto a fabulously new content. Now it is said in the Gospel, isn't it, that one must avoid putting new wine into old wineskins, and so the project of André Chénier—you know, the only—
2:15:47 great poet of the eighteenth century—it couldn't have both, the century of reason, of thought, and a century of poetry, you can't have your cake and eat it too—but Chénier, nonetheless, who is an exception, made this famous line about 'new thoughts making ancient verses'—it's the failure of this project I'm denouncing here. All the aesthetic, literary, posterity in Hegel's era is an alternation between a romantic, modern surge, a search for the absolute, for infinity, and a neoclassical reaction that will be called Parnassian in the middle of the century. But then, as I said, when Baudelaire returns and sweeps away this fragile compromise that the Parnasse had been for a while, recovering flesh and vibration that had been somewhat absent from Parnassian marble, this again leads to a still-neoclassical reaction—this will be Valéry in poetry or Gide in the novel, isn't it, who in their theoretical writings, in their voice-off if you prefer, are explicitly, rather violently, anti-romantic—to the point that Gide would go so far as to say, and thousands of kids have written essays on this, 'classicism is a tamed romanticism'—you see, well, that doesn't work: surrealism comes again and knocks down Valéry and Gide, you see.
2:16:57 it's not a linear process—one might turn it around as if there really had been an end of history at that point—not an end, meaning, nor anyone circulating, leaving the room, 'nothing to see here'—it never went that far, Hegel never thought history stopped with him. You will find nowhere in him that there is an end of history, or that there is no more art—he even says, on the contrary, that art will never cease to perfect itself. What is finished, what came to an end, for example with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, is the fact that, as Fra Angelico painted—things will go on being born—he painted the Virgin and the Saints, he painted them kneeling, this is that immediate relation. You might tell me there are thoughts—those that are most fashionable today, I'm thinking of Nietzsche's, and I want to criticize less Nietzsche than the shameless use made of him in contemporary counter-revolution. If you look closely at the return of Nietzsche, or his popularization in the 1970s, at the moment the Soviet Union was beginning to weaken, and at the moment when, visibly, in the Cold War, it was the West that was regaining the upper hand—because the younger ones don't know this, there was a moment when the West did tremble, and not only in 1945, because 'we, the superior race'—I'm speaking as if I were German—one morning we wake up—
2:18:07 in 1945, with Muzhiks on the Elbe—that hurts, doesn't it—the subhumans who are now our masters—that's already unbearable, but a bit later, worse—it's 1957, first Soviet artificial satellite. It seems strange to hear this today, because now the Soviet Union is coded rather as crude, rustic—I don't know, as my German father-in-law used to say, a bit rustic, the Russian plane we took—yes, but it was they who sent the first artificial satellite, they were the first to reach what's called escape velocity. What symbolism, for Hegel, who compared, following Kant, the world of nature—that of Newton, where Newton is right—governed by the law of falling bodies, by gravity, by weight—which today is still the enigma, isn't it, of astrophysicists, gravity, they were trying to find particles, what are called gravitons, you know, particles of gravity—and its antonym, freedom, which on the contrary moves upward, isn't it, gravity moves downward, and that's what made Kant say Rousseau was the Newton of morality, because parallel to the world of nature, where it's the direction—
2:19:17 of falling, in short, downward direction dominates—the world of man is the world of freedom, upward. Fine image. And so here comes the first escape velocity—that's a term from astrophysics, I didn't invent it—in '57, that's strange indeed, you see. So you can't imagine the trauma—I remember, my parents had Paris Match at the time, following the first Sputnik, and in Paris Match you saw young Russians poorly dressed, working out equations on a blackboard—they may have no butter, but they're thirsty for knowledge, there's a new world, and people wondered, are we going to hold up, are we going to—well, you know the rest, isn't it, all you had to do was raise the bar a bit higher in terms of military budget and so on, and the Russians fell to their knees. And I'll close this little parenthesis just to say that, for me, the main cause of the economic crisis we're living through is that we are now paying—that's why I mention it, to be topical—the bill for the Cold War. Enormous amounts of money had to be spent, invested, currency created, as they say, inflation, in order to confront international communist subversion. Now we're paying the price, well, yes.
Ignorance cannot be learned: Nietzsche and pity 2:20:27 So there, I come back to the history of decline—and the Occident, you see clearly, the Occident has become a concept, I hope, between us. One can be in the Occident in Patagonia, in Japan, or deep in the Sahara. The problem is that it's the end of the journey—the end of the journey is when one knows, when one knows, when one can no longer have the mirage of illusions that were effective when one didn't know. We've all had, with our children, we've all had a little pang in the heart when we explained to them that Santa Claus doesn't exist—well, but once we know he doesn't exist, it's hard to act as if he did. That's why I quoted Nerval earlier, who said, for me, the clearest and most significant phrase at this level, and it somewhat sums up—and I'll come back to Nietzsche—the wanderings of today: 'ignorance cannot be learned.' I cannot deliberately learn things which, through knowledge, I already know to be false. I can't now amuse myself by saying, well, no, I'll decide the earth isn't round but is cubic, I don't know—ignorance cannot be learned. I can learn everything, there's always something to learn until the end of my life, I hope, agreed—but not ignorance, precisely.
2:21:37 Every time I learn something I make progress in knowledge, not progress in ignorance—ignorance cannot be learned. Whether we were thrown into knowledge by force or whether it proceeded from ourselves, in either case it does produce a new world. And here I'm going to read you a rather striking text at this level, which will contradict, when I think of contemporary ideology and the shameless use of Nietzsche—I'm thinking less of Nietzsche than of the use made of him by, for example, Onfray—a dominant philosopher whom I call the beach philosopher, because he's broadcast to us via France Culture every July on the beaches, and I confess it's less demanding. And Onfray, you know, his watchword is hedonism—it's a philosophy, enough already with the philosopher of maceration, of misery, of the tragic, Hegel, death, the understanding—what one needs in life is to enjoy oneself. Very well, who could disagree? It's like Bush when he says, 'I stand for good against evil'—who's going to be for evil? Nobody. These values, one must be wary of them when they're consensual, it means there's no discussion—have you ever seen someone lie under cars, breathing in the exhaust fumes with delight? No one—no one is for pollution, so why is anyone against it?
2:22:51 I'll read you this passage which says: 'I too would like to escape, like you'—as Novalis says, we quoted him earlier—'to escape through the golden flow of the grapes'—booze—'the brown sap of the poppy'—there, for artificial paradises—'or the tender breast of the virgin who makes a paradise for us'—eros—these are the three modes of escape that Flowers of Evil will illustrate chapter by chapter. And there, I'm mistaken, forgive me—there, I'll move on to the question, that's a piece missing, sorry, excuse me—there, from the introduction—so now I'm not confusing the preface and the introduction after all—here's what is limited to a natural life, an animal for example—
2:24:01 what is limited to a natural life does not by itself have the power to go beyond its immediate being-there—I said earlier that bees have always reproduced their immediate being-there—but it is driven beyond this being-there by another, and this being, torn from its position, is its death. The animal does what it can to subsist, in the absence of existing, it subsists, and when it has exhausted its powers of resistance, it dies. But consciousness is for itself its own concept—for itself, and no longer its limit coming from outside but from itself—it is therefore immediately the act of surpassing the limited, and when this limited belongs to it, the act of surpassing itself. You have all reflected a great deal on the famous phrase from Goethe's Faust: 'Stirb und werde.'
2:24:42 'If you are a misfortune, die and become.' But consciousness—this is why—with singular existence, the beyond is at the same time posited within consciousness, be it still merely, as in spatial intuition, alongside the limited—let's pass over that—consciousness, there, that's where I'm getting to, thus undergoes this violence coming from itself, this knowledge—I know Santa Claus doesn't exist, it's less fun than when I believed he did, well yes—consciousness therefore undergoes, coming from itself, this violence by which it spoils for itself every limited satisfaction—in feeling, that's not a knowledge, in feeling—in the feeling of this violence, anxiety may well recoil before the truth, may aspire and strive to preserve that very thing threatened with loss, cling to the acquisitions of ignorance—but this anxiety cannot be appeased in vain, it wants to fix itself in a thoughtless inertia which assures itself that everything is good in its kind—backward we do not want to look, we do not want to let ourselves be rocked like an unsteady boat on the sea—this is very abstractly all I know—this anxiety cannot be appeased in vain, it wants to fix itself in a thoughtless inertia: thought then comes to disturb the absence of thought, and its restlessness disturbs this inertia.
2:25:52 In vain it clings—consciousness—to a certain form of sentimentality which assures that everything is good in its kind; this assurance suffers just as much violence from reason, which does not find something good precisely insofar as it is a kind. You see, this is a rather frightening text in a way, because it reminds us that once the process of knowledge has begun, there is a level of irreversibility. And poor Nietzsche—because I like Nietzsche myself, provided it's the poor Nietzsche—this is a tragic figure who taught us that it's not in reason, in the concept, in clear and distinct ideas, to speak like Descartes, nor through Enlightenment, that one is fulfilled, but on the contrary in the burst, or in the Dionysian—I'm caricaturing a bit, it's more Onfray than Nietzsche, but still—and above all that there was—and here it's pure Nietzsche—there was, as the principal counter-value, as the adversary he raged against, pity, the Christian feeling par excellence. Everyone knows Nietzsche's violently anti-Christian stance, to the point that he said 'aut Christus aut Zarathustra'—either one is for Christ or for Zarathustra, there's no compromise, things are clear.
2:27:03 And well, no—because some of you may know how his madness broke out—I speak of madness, not the neurosis found in every bourgeois family, I speak of the real madness, the poor thing, the kind one commits people for. It started in Turin in '89—he had already published his main works long before, he, the adversary of pity—when he sees a mistreated horse in the streets of Turin, he pushes the driver aside, starts hugging the horse tightly, makes a scene in the street, and then had to be committed. That's how it started. So in fact he thought he was rid of pity, as he said, beyond it—and God knows how, in the Nazi era, this way of speaking was exploited, to send packing all commiseration, all sense of the slave-like inferior that compassion supposedly is. In fact, he practically died of pity, poor man—well, died psychically at least, for madness is a psychic death since one loses one's identity—and died of pity, you see. Interesting, because at the time his main adversary was Wagner, the composer, with whom he had been very close—
2:28:13 very close friends at the time, of which he himself said it was the happiest period of his life, when he frequented this man of fire, Wagner, who was, I don't know, some thirty years older than him. And Wagner, he liked it when Wagner made the character of Siegfried—Siegfried is the man without pity who sends laws, values, old men, etc., packing with his sword, and starts by breaking his ancestor Wotan's spear into a thousand pieces. And well, Wagner, at the end of his life, redeemed himself of these fine acquisitions by giving us his Parsifal—the Germanization of Perceval, who is precisely the opposite of Siegfried, who is the hero of pity, not the cowboy who draws and shoots the first comer, but on the contrary the one who, when struck on one cheek, turns the other, who is dumbfounded, doesn't know what to say when important things arise, and above all who has but one feeling, that of compassion. And so Nietzsche mocks, isn't it, in Beyond Good and Evil in particular, this weakness of the old Wagner, who must have gone senile since he sank into Christianity, compassion and all that. And when Nietzsche writes this, what's comical—
2:29:24 in what I'm saying now—well, comical—is that those who base themselves on this text of Nietzsche to criticize Wagner are in the most comical position, because those who stick to this text believe themselves, thanks to Nietzsche, exempt, isn't it, from the Wagner stage, the Wagner moment, as Nietzsche—Hegel, rather—would say. But in fact one must know that Nietzsche, when he wrote that, had not heard a single measure, musically speaking, of the work—only the text had reached him, and this text, with its Christian references, had gotten on his nerves, and well, Wagner does lay it on thick. And when he heard the first measures of Parsifal at Monte Carlo, where he was on vacation—because he spent his winters on the Mediterranean and his summers in the mountains, in Austria, in Switzerland, in Austria—when he heard for the first time the first measures of Parsifal, he wrote an admirable letter to his main musical correspondent, Peter Gast, telling him: Wagner has never done better, it's his masterpiece. I admire this Nietzsche who contradicts himself, who is not the one most often quoted, and who, when he hears Wagner's composition, says it leaves far behind everything he had written before—whereas he had just said in Beyond Good and Evil that it was a work of decadence, a shoddy, senile piece. So, we're talking about pity, you see, this was an enormous stake—
2:30:34 of the relation to the other, and what I'm illustrating through this long detour via Nietzsche is that it's not enough to go to war against pity to be exempt from it. And Nietzsche should have—poor Nietzsche, as I say, he's a great fool—I mean that as a great fool, someone I like, not like the President, I say it as the most intelligent of debunkers, no no, he's a great fool, a good little German bourgeois terrified by the Paris Commune—we have unambiguous texts on this—he enlisted as a volunteer in the Prussian army to go fight this mephitic vapor coming from the French revolution—he ended up being taken as a stretcher-bearer, of course, he was truly a volunteer, absolutely, but he was already of weak constitution, he had migraines, his eyes crossed, so they said, you go to the ambulances, you can't hold a rifle—but still, this is to say, he bashed the Communards, well yes, like Schopenhauer who called the police to say, there are the rioters, two streets from my house—these are still the idols of the contemporary intelligentsia, allow me to cite this. This is where you see, when I say we never cease living the alternation of revolution and counter-revolution, I'm not speaking entirely at random, I try to be concrete.
Everyone is a child of his time: thinking our present 2:31:45 and I try to conform to Hegel's main teaching, which is that everyone is the son of his time—that is, we think we're speaking of Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, Hegel, but in fact we are expressing our time without knowing it—it's our time that is being tested through us and that determines us. This is very pre-Marxist, what he's saying here, it's the historical present that determines my thought before it even begins to develop, and if I want to free myself from its determination, I must become conscious of it. In this sense, he takes up a bit the Spinozist conception of freedom, that is, being free is not opposing everything that is determined, it is, on the contrary, recognizing the determination. Spinoza, like Hegel, take up the formula first stated by Spinoza: freedom is the intellection of necessity. It's only when I understand the mechanisms by which water can be drained and irrigate crops that I free myself from drought—it's not by ignoring the laws of nature, on the contrary, it's by familiarizing myself with their determination. Freedom is the intellection of necessity—to free myself from necessity, I must become conscious of it, and not simply say, on my side, 'I am free.'
2:32:55 'I am not subject to necessity'—that's an abstract, immediate, and gratuitous assertion, as Hegel would say. So there, it's my historical present that determines me when I believe myself to be in the midst of Plato and Aristotle in the city of Athens, or when I anticipate the future, when I imagine the city of tomorrow, when I imagine the past—I can only imagine it, because past and future have this in common, that they are not there, by hypothesis; not being there, isn't it, we cannot have them present, so we can only represent them to ourselves. It's important to recall these things—this cup here is present before my eyes, it's a product of the immediate world, but if I close my eyes and it's no longer there, I can still represent it to myself. So every time I anticipate the future or try to imagine the past, Hegel reminds us, before Marx who made this a 'Robinsonade,' that in fact I never leave my present—my historical present determines me, all the more so the less I'm conscious of it. I remind you that the notion of 'Robinsonade' is a properly Marxist concept—Marx called Robinsonades the attempts by which bourgeois anthropologists—I use 'bourgeois' here in a sociological, not pejorative, sense—Marx himself was a bourgeois—
2:34:05 like you and me—who tried to imagine the origin of society by saying that isolated producers had understood, since prehistoric times, that if we band together, four or five or ten of us, it's perhaps better for hunting the mammoth than if I stay alone. Marx says that's a story told to children, these are Robinsonades—we act as if there had been isolated men before there was society, but nowhere—look at scientific anthropology this time—every time we find the remains of the earliest men, the earliest chipped-stone toolmakers, whatever, we realize man is always already in society, he is zoon politikon, as Aristotle says, social animal, political animal, whichever translation you prefer, zoon politikon—that is, being human precisely means being that animal whose specific trait is that it cannot live except from the moment when relation to the other has become determining. So it's useless to try to say, well, there were men in nature who found that by uniting it was nicer and more effective for protecting themselves and subsisting—no, no, no, it's the reverse: it's not human individuals who produced society, it's society that produced the humanization of the animals we all once were.
2:35:15 At the origin, this is still important to understand, it's Rousseau who was the first to understand this, and it's what makes Kant and all those who follow, starting with Hegel, say that Rousseau is the Newton of morality, I mean mores – yes, yes, it's not morality in the moralizing sense – that is, Rousseau is the Newton of anthropology, just as Newton is the reference for the world of nature, natural science, human science: we always find the same division since that era, namely Rousseau says it very well – while we take Rousseau to be the advocate of the good savage and that man, the true man, is self-sufficient in nature, Rousseau says exactly the opposite. The Rousseau we read is not quite the one that's reported. So I quote from memory in The Social Contract a passage to which I attach great importance, it's chapter 6 of the first book called "On the Civil State," I quote Rousseau: this passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had lacked before. Although in this new state he deprives himself of several advantages which he holds from nature, he gains such great ones in return – Rousseau – his faculties are exercised
2:36:26 and developed – we saw earlier what language brought to thought – his faculties are exercised and developed, his passions are ennobled – passion in the classical sense means something one undergoes, it's not at all passion in the romantic sense, it's something one undergoes, that one has no choice about, like the fact of being hungry, that's a passion, not an action. His passions are ennobled – for example sexuality, a passion of the species, becomes love or marriage, for example. His passions are ennobled, his soul as a whole is elevated, to such a point that if the abuses of this new condition – this is where there's a theory of evil in Rousseau, of evil done by man – did not often degrade him below the condition from which he emerged – and here I insist, I do it every time, but common sense, how can one be below the animal, that's what Rousseau is saying here, you have a genuine theory of evil, and evil such as that word can resonate in the 20th century after Auschwitz, whatever one wants to call it, it really is a theory of evil, for once, in a philosopher – namely, if the abuses of this new condition, that of the civil state, did not often degrade him below the beast, below that from which he emerged, he ought – pay attention to the tense and mood of the verb – he ought to bless without ceasing
2:37:36 the happy moment which tore him from it forever – there's the quotation – and which, from a stupid and limited animal, made an intelligent being and a man. Rousseau is very clear, contrary to the Rousseau we're taught and the good savage – he's saying that it's precisely in passing from a stupid and limited animal to an intelligent being and a man that man became human; it's precisely society that hominizes man, for better and for worse, Rousseau adds, with the abuses of new conditions – it's not moral. So I insist a great deal on this aspect, and in the era we live in, we see, on the contrary, anti-humanist values triumphing – one of the dominant philosophies in recent years, that of Foucault for example – I'm not speaking behind his back, on the contrary I'm taking the letter of his text, I believe everyone who knows it will recognize it – Foucault says that man is a recent invention, dating from about the 18th century, and, fortunately, he says, man is bound to disappear soon, and his whole thought is conceived as an anti-humanism. Lévi-Strauss – I'm taking several master thinkers who have not had a marginal influence on the contemporary intelligentsia, I'm speaking of everything that has reigned, broadly, since the 1970s – I'll make a small aside
2:38:46 Hegelian-Marxist this time, the 1970s, that's the reference point and the break – it's curious because it's a break in many domains that seem at first sight, but here I'm being naïve, at first sight independent of one another, but you can well imagine they're linked. There's the domain, for example, of thought – I'm in the process of discussing it – the domain of philosophical ideas, but if I take the domain of economics, apparently that has nothing to do with it, the economic transformations, not of economic thought – it's the moment when we move to financial economics, which is in crisis today – it's in the 1970s that we move from an industrial expansion linked to the expansion of the Trente Glorieuses – it's not about reconstruction and equipment anymore – to this cancer of an economy that no longer produces real wealth but produces finance, it's financialized – I won't develop this too much because that's all we've talked about for several years, and especially since I'm going to have to come to the conclusion of this first session, I'd like to conclude on this, that is, make it understood that thanks to Hegelian thought we have an opportunity, and if we want to understand it as we understand ourselves – I believe the two are linked – the main effort that remains for us to make is to think our own time. It's not because we live in it that we think it. I don't know if we take
2:39:56 a bit of distance – thinking our time in order to understand, afterward, the past, as well as what we can imagine of the future, and that the determinations of our era, if we don't become aware of them, will determine everything we're going to think – so we might as well become aware of it now. And so next time I'll move straight on to the stakes of why read Hegel today, at the current moment of the conflict between revolution and counter-revolution, which, as I said earlier, we haven't emerged from in two centuries. So there you have it, you have five minutes for questions, if there are any, if there's a need for clarification – yes, please – I think I understood very well the relation between the end of history and consciousness – you need to work on it, my girl, if you don't understand – it's hard, there's five minutes to answer – wait, what answer – joking aside, the answer in the Bible, theology is serious, as Rimbaud says, hell is truly below and heaven above – that's Rimbaud – what is it, the deal that the serpent proposes to Eve? If you taste this fruit
2:41:07 you will be like God, knowing good and evil – he knows it well, the cunning one, he's cunning, he knows well that knowledge caused harm somewhere, that consciousness collapsed – belief in Santa Claus, for example, that's what the beginning of history is – but of course, but yes, but why do you want the end of history – because we had to wait until the end of the twentieth century for man to assume his condition, which has been the same all along – but you weren't there, I think, in the first part, where I was saying precisely that it took the Enlightenment, before Hegel, to fight against the religious bond that let us answer these questions before even asking them. The thought of death could not appear because it was immediately eluded, and since the Neolithic, by rites and burial, by sepulture, there was a beyond that came to reassure somewhere and prevented thought from thinking finitude, and thus prevented man from embracing his condition. And in a way, one could say that perhaps the greatest title to glory of Christianity is to have invented a god to whom not only are animals not sacrificed, to whom not only are men not sacrificed, but who sacrifices himself, humanly – it's a total inversion – and who embraces the human condition
2:42:17 all the way to the end – I'm alluding here, giving of course a secular reading of the Gospel, well, I'm not betraying its letter, far from it, I don't believe the spirit is judged rather in the garden of olives, when Jesus suddenly, for the first time, feels the anguish of his mission – all the same, if it were a happy ending, one where he says: I die like this, I breathe my last, but it's a trick, I'll rise again in three days, I'm Superman, nothing can touch me, don't worry – if that were the story, there'd be nothing dramatic about it. But that's not it, he feels the anguish that every man feels when dying, that's what's admirable, not only the physical pain, the lashes of the whip, the rods, the crown of thorns, when he says Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, my father, why have you abandoned me – there, Christ becomes man fully, he even has anguish and the... [sinicture?] so he accomplished – Es ist vollbracht, as it's said in the Passion according to Saint Matthew – he fully accomplished the human condition. It takes time, historically, for that – what Hegel calls the patience, the labor and the calvary of the concept – it takes time, patience, as I answer the question
