English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Questions from the audience and landmarks in the history of philosophy 0:01 I would like, for once, to start by giving you the floor, precisely because you're one of those who show a recurring presence, attention, and so since I tend to ramble a bit and make a lot of detours, I wondered whether it might be necessary—actually I think it is—for me to give you the floor and for you to ask questions, questions which... well, there are always at least three reasons to ask a question: the primary one is that we haven't understood, or it's not very clear, that goes without saying. The second is that we've understood but we'd like... we disagree, we've understood but we don't agree, that's a reason at least as important. And thirdly, we've understood, we agree, but we'd like to know more about that particular point.
0:59 That's quite a few reasons to ask questions, so here I am, at your disposal, particularly on the sequence about the philosophy of knowledge. I mean, there are some who are bothered by a problem we saw right from the beginning, from the introduction of the concept of philosophy—no problem there. It's actually funny that he brings in Locke, since that goes back to the seventeenth century. And yet, even now, we still see its effects in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, where it's most often the history of ideas. They don't know the French exercise of the classical Greek-style dissertation at all—it's absolutely unknown, for example, in England.
1:33 I know quite a few students who are in both systems, and they made comparisons—and you still find that today. And the only other country that has philosophy as a subject in the final year of secondary school in Europe, namely Italy, well, they call it a philosophy course, but in fact there's no reflection on concepts or programs the way there is with us. With us there's also a historical compilation, but in Italy that's all there is: here's what Aristotle said, here's what the Stoics said, here's what the Epicureans said, and so on. So, a little historical preamble—your question is interesting on that level.
2:03 Yes, there is a link. There's a link, no doubt, in my view unnoticed by Locke himself. It's the fact that as soon as you tackle the problem of the union of soul and body, to speak as they did at the time in what's called classical philosophy—let me give you some reference points in the history of philosophy. Broad periodization: there's the first great period, the Socratics strictly speaking, that is Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Then afterward there are the moral schools, the Epicureans and the Stoics, which correspond historically, roughly, to the so-called Alexandrian period.
2:41 Then there's a great silence—I won't get scolded by de Libera, who's the specialist in medieval philosophy, but I mean, I'm not saying there are no very great philosophers in the Middle Ages, there are. But I mean, there's this long parenthesis before the Cartesian awakening from scholasticism, which occupies—as they used to say at the time—the period when philosophy is 'ancilla theologiae,' the servant of theology. And from the moment Saint Thomas Aquinas decided that, in order to provide a justification for the Church's power, it was perhaps necessary to work through Aristotle, to found things on Aristotle—because before Saint Thomas, I mean, there was no need for a justification, a blow with a club, a blow with a halberd, that's what I was saying about power—and, you know, peoples are terrible, peoples rise up, there was the movement of the communes in the Middle Ages, in the thirteenth century, and all that, it began.
3:30 There are heresies especially, the Cathars, the Waldensians, and so on, and they're all communists, these people. I'm serious. If you notice, I'm making a little historical parenthesis: among the Waldensians, the Cathars, their accusers at the Inquisition always say the same thing—they hold women in common, they hold property in common. And then they indulge in appalling debaucheries, homosexuality, well, they always sell the same fantasies. But in fact, what always terrifies the accuser is that they hold goods in common, including women.
Galileo and Descartes: the mechanistic order of bodies 4:01 And as Marx says, the very first property relation—he speaks of the separation of man and woman in the social division of labor—that's an interesting little remark, isn't it. So, back to what you were saying: when you tackle the problem of the union of soul and body, that's from Descartes onward, that's the peak of so-called classical philosophy, the Cartesians—even those who oppose Descartes, I'm thinking of Spinoza, of Leibniz—but who inherit the new positioning of the problem that Descartes inaugurates, who initiates so-called modern philosophy, and which is the peak of classical European metaphysics; at that time, I mean, the systems of Spinoza and Leibniz, of Malebranche, etc., it's Descartes.
4:48 So that's for the context. When you bring in the soul, going back directly now to your question, the difference with the body is that the order of the body is mechanistic, the order of bodies is mechanistic. That's the great discovery of the age. It doesn't originate with a philosopher, it comes from a scientist, Galileo after all. And then it's Descartes who will formulate the concept of inertia, which Galileo found empirically—well, 'empirically' is the same misnomer, since Galileo always says he needs, besides being verified in experience, to have the adequate mathematical formulation—but I mean he found it operationally, whereas Descartes is the first to formulate it in today's terms: a body subject to no force—correct me if I'm wrong, scientists—is either at rest or moving with uniform rectilinear motion, roughly speaking.
5:35 And so, the order of bodies is mechanical—it seems like nothing, but mechanistic. Yet that was already an enormous revolution; we're coming out of several millennia of animate matter, of inclination, of impetus, to explain the movements of bodies—people said the pebble had an impetus, they had a naive, finalist vision. The proverbial examples: it's Aristotle who explains the acceleration of falling bodies—he was a fine observer, Aristotle, he had seen very well, as others before him had too, that bodies accelerate as they fall, you don't need to be a great scholar for that—but the explanation he gives is interesting. He says, yes, we mustn't forget that for him, if there's motion, it's because a body must rejoin its natural place: heavy bodies go downward, because the natural place of heavy bodies is down—well yes, at the time, up and down were substances, I wanted to tell you that—and smoke, which on the contrary is a light body, quite naturally goes upward. You know as well as I do that smoke falls like lead in Newton's tube,
6:45 but that's the explanation he gives; it doesn't matter that he was mistaken, we shouldn't be anachronistic, and demand of a scientist from the Neanderthal era, as we said earlier, that he already have the full infinitesimal calculus—Descartes found so many things, or Aristotle, that he can be wrong elsewhere; on the other hand, his explanation is very telling. He says bodies accelerate because it's like horses: when they head back to the stable, they smell the stable's scent from afar, so they speed up, because they sense their natural place, their home, so to speak—you can clearly see the finalist, anthropomorphic side. Well, all of that is swept away by Galilean-Cartesian mechanism, which officially reigns to this day. Still, we mustn't forget there's the inert and then there's the living, and even the living—Claude Bernard, who was the first to found biology more or less scientifically, has that famous statement you probably know: the living is the dead. We have a scientific, not a delirious, approach to the biological, and since then, roughly, physico-chemical models are applied to it,
7:55 that means—that is, the same models as for inert bodies. Well, I can tell you, that's a given for us now, but in Descartes's time, this de-animation—forgive the barbarism—of the world around us, and returning it to its inertness, keeping the soul only, on the side of the cogito, was still something new. And while I'm at it—and this is very much at the heart of the subject, one of the other points—to answer your question, in doing this, Descartes, surprise, accomplishes—Hegel would have said, in terms of the ruse of reason—one of the foundations of Christian civilization.
Descartes accomplishes Christian transcendence against animism 8:42 I don't know if any of you sees the connection. Generally, they're opposed: Descartes, that's the world, right, there's nothing less faithful to Descartes's text than what's called 'Cartesian' in everyday language. Well, Descartes, that's having your feet on the ground, that's—whereas Pascal, he's about God, he's the mystic, that we'd understand—but Descartes, what connection? You see, it doesn't seem to matter, but it does, with Christianity: the fact of de-animating what surrounds us. Christianity, like Islam, like the Jewish religion—in order, then, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in chronological order—have in common that they are religions of transcendence.
9:26 But nothing that surrounds us is on par with God, who alone holds the principle of life. He can communicate it to man, fine, but everything else is inert. It's not nothing to say that this is not animate, that this is not animate. That's the old world. You see, what Hegel calls the patience of the concept—it takes 20 centuries for an abstract statement to begin to be actualized a little. I mean there wouldn't have been the scientific and technological world we know in what's called the West—well, now there will be other cases and we'll have to come back to that—we wouldn't have had this emancipation which follows directly from Descartes's program to make man the master and possessor of nature.
10:03 We wouldn't have had that program in a civilization where you mustn't touch this spring because there are nymphs in it, because it's sacred. I'm serious, I lived in Africa for a long time and I say this with great respect. There's nothing more animist than sub-Saharan Africa. Even bank executives I've known, who studied at Harvard and all that, there was a collapse one day because of construction flaws in the Palais des Congrès in Niger—fortunately no one was there because the national conference had been held two days before. I said to a Nigerien friend—he told me, no, you got off easy, luckily you weren't there during the session.
10:35 He told me, no, I wasn't worried because in our family we have an alliance with the air. So I would have turned into a draft of air too—but very seriously, straight away. And a second example—I won't dwell only on this anecdote—but I had a friend at the time who was preparing the agrégation in literature and who had her regular little outing by taxi to go see the dunes not far from Niamey, to go watch the sunset. She had a driver at her disposal, and she told me that this driver, whom I had chosen through the Catholic mission to have someone reliable, with a license, not dealing in anything shady, security, literate, able to fill out the bank forms flawlessly—well, and she told me this: they're heading back to the car, I think there was a bundle of newspapers on her head, and night falls very quickly there, there's no long twilight, and he tells her, 'Madame, go on ahead a bit there, because there are hoodlums who don't bother with me over there.'
11:27 Bushes all the way to the horizon, it's the Sahel, semi-desert. Little fires in the distance, little Fulani villages, not very reassured, she goes to the car and then sees in the rearview mirror him coming back. She says, 'All right, madame, you can go now.' 'Well, where were your friends?' 'The whites, we can't see them, and it was my mother's spirits who came from Burkina to tell me I hadn't given enough millet on my mother's grave.' And he was having a discussion with his mother's spirits—it's quite an extraordinary story, it was a guy, you see, quite normal, much more normal than me most of the time, and he had this response, and above all, where I wanted to get to, I told them—he told me he'd told them: 'All right, you there, you the spirits, I've already told you that when I'm working with the white lady, don't bother me.'
12:16 It's extraordinary, you see, the almost realistic side of the answer. So, that's to tell you that when I speak of animism, it's still what has animated—so to speak—humanity as a whole. Well, people have shared it fairly evenly, to paraphrase Descartes—my Corsican grandmother kissing the crucifix, or praying to Saint Anthony of Padua to find her ring, all that—it's not very Christian, this isn't a criticism. But there you go, so with Descartes, we actualize the seriousness of Christianity, we go hunting for idols.
The soul calls for finality: Locke, Coleridge, Kant 12:47 That's it, the hunt for immanence. There you go. So, we're still not quite at the heart of your question—from the moment I bring in the soul, but the soul in the Cartesian sense, that is, a substance completely separate—I'm speaking of the substance of the res extensa, of extension, of the corporeal thing, which is the object of the physicist or the geometer according to Descartes—the soul remains a theoretical notion. It's there; if there's a criticism to make of Descartes, it's there: he's fascinated by the theoretical viewpoint, with that forgetting shared by all great philosophers at a given moment, when they're caught up in their cognitive modeling, that originally, the principle of philosophy is not cognitive.
13:34 It's that there's a search for wisdom which is primary in relation to the search for knowledge. Where am I getting at? You cannot speak of the soul without bringing in the notion of finality. And there, we're no longer in the cognitive order. That's why the union of soul and body is insoluble in Cartesian terms, hence the wild speculations, the pineal gland and so on. And so Locke, in turn, if he rejects the union of soul and body, it's not because of the body, it's because of the soul. And there, even more so, there's a constant in Anglo-Saxon thought that governs modern neopositivism, broadly speaking.
14:07 It's that there's no question of touching on the slightest teleological resonance for those who... Everything concerning the explanation of a thing by an end, a goal one pursues. In philosophy, we prefer to say 'end' rather than 'goal.' I say that because my goal is to catch the metro. But why? To arrive on time where? At school. Why? Because my goal is the baccalaureate. The end is when it's finished. That's what's behind all this. That's what's been forgotten, actually. All right.
14:38 And don't you know that magnificent poem by an English poet named Coleridge, from the late 18th, early 19th century, a time when things are moving a lot and Romanticism is starting to bare its claws. And Coleridge, who was a great opium-eater by the way, one of the first 'poètes maudits,' a whole generation before the notion even appeared, wrote his most famous poem. I recommend it to you, it should be on the internet: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' or 'The Ballad of the Old Sailor.' It depends a bit on the translation.
15:11 And it's—it's a long, very English poem that takes place on a ship, shipwrecks, superb scenes, venturing toward the South Pole, unexplored at the time—anyway. And right at the very beginning, the first stanza, a young man is about to enter a church because he's invited to a wedding, you can already hear the sound of the bassoon inside the church. And just as he's about to go in, there's a beggar at the door who looks at him like that and says there was a ship. He's going to tell him the whole poem afterward, he's going to tell him the story of the ship.
15:43 And the young man is swept up like that. He's forgotten what his goal was. Is it to listen to him, or is it the wedding he's invited to? He's going to listen to him to the end. He's captivated by the old man's tale. So there, I mean, from the moment we recall, as Kant does, that there's a faculty of ends called reason. Not the understanding. The understanding is mathematical, logical, it's hypothetico-deductive, if you like. Right? But reason cannot avoid the notion of end.
16:15 And here, let me recall the whole beginning of my course: the foundation of the philosophical question lies more in 'what must I do' than in 'what can I know.' More than—I didn't say, I especially didn't oppose them, because the great originality of philosophy—which isn't the only discipline to ask 'what must I do'—is that it wants to answer that question in terms of knowledge. I always recall this pairing, I mean, and not in terms of contingent opinion. Going back to our little discussion just now, a bit before the session, that's the link, that's the complicity between the philosopher and the mathematician.
Descartes's long chains of reasons 16:50 There's no question of treating the questions we ask ourselves, which are not scientific and mathematical questions—namely 'what must I do,' 'where is good or evil'—the same as 'what is true, what is false.' That's completely independent. I cannot answer them, I want to answer them, with the same rigor that geometers put into their demonstrations. In fact, there's a passage in the Discourse on Method that sums this up well.
17:20 I'm still on the same question. When he stated those famous four rules of method—four rules, whereas in Aristotle's logic there are four volumes, but Descartes has contempt for scholasticism, he wants to get out of it, it's been ten centuries, so he says four rules, that's enough. And at the end, after stating the four rules, he says this—I'll quote it literally—'those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy'—easy for him, since he's talking about equations like Fermat's in his time—'that geometers are accustomed to using.'
17:54 Easy for you more than for me. Well, we get what he means. 'Those long chains of reasons, all simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, gave me occasion to imagine'—careful, we're no longer in mathematical demonstration—'to imagine that all things which can fall within human knowledge follow one another in the same way'—the same way as what? As what one finds in a mathematical model, with the same necessity, the same manner.
18:28 And that—the sentence isn't finished—'provided only that one never accepts as true anything that is not'—you'll agree that's the metaphor of the chain: these long chains, if one link is removed, everything collapses. So, since all this requires that not a single false proposition [be included]... and that, provided one refrains from accepting as true anything that is not, and that one always keeps the necessary order. And there's this conclusion which shows the optimism, as they say, of Descartes: 'there can be nothing so far removed that one may not eventually reach it, nor so hidden that one may not discover it.'
19:05 Excuse me, but I'm making a bit of a show of it, like a woman being undressed, you see, in that Cartesian, musketeer style, as though truth—well known that truth comes naked out of the well, doesn't it. There's an old complicity between truth and nakedness. 'So far removed that one may eventually reach it, so hidden that one may discover it.' That's exactly what defines the position of philosophical dogmatism. Not dogmatism in the ordinary, purely pejorative sense—you find this definition very well in Kant, for instance—it's that there is no assignable limit to knowledge. Descartes says yes, he himself is limited in his conceptions, and the weakness of his conceptions is a mark of insufficiency, but there is an indefinite progress toward the truth, provided one refrains from accepting as true anything that is not, and always keeps the necessary order.
19:49 I'm analyzing this passage because you have the chains. You see? So I'm bringing out thoughts that Descartes perhaps didn't think, but which he did better than think—he expressed them. The deep truth is in this image of chains, because you already have determinism there. Chains—you think of prison, and yes indeed! Having a Galilean and Cartesian approach to the motion of the Moon relative to the Earth means saying that the Moon has no choice at all.
20:19 It's not even eligible for a reduced sentence like a prisoner. It can't say to itself, 'What if I went and orbited Saturn for a change of scenery'—no, no, no. The Earth is the larger mass, the Moon has no choice, it orbits it. So, 'these long chains of reasons, all simple,' and he adds, 'gave me occasion to imagine that all things'—including what? Beauty, the sacred, love, the existence of God, all those things—must be spoken of the way geometers do, with reasons that follow one another in the same way.
20:53 You see? I bring this up because we'll have to wait for Kant—but we're not there yet, so I'm saying it for free for now, to show that there are limits to this kind of hypothetico-deductive approach—not limits in the sense that the object is too complex or that we're powerless, but limits inside ourselves. We'll come back to that. So that's what I wanted to address. I believe that if Locke avoids the union of soul and body, it's because the problem of the soul—not merely of the intellect, toward which Descartes pulls it, the thinking substance—the problem of the soul would bring in issues of finality and teleology.
The end as meaning: sign, language, sema-soma 21:28 Telos is the end, television is seeing from afar—it's a bit of a stretch, but a warning sign for a stop sign is exactly what makes you think of finality. So there you go, that's in relation to your question—yes, of course there's a link. There's a link because empiricism, setting aside everything that doesn't appear, everything that isn't sensible—aesthetic in the etymological sense, what doesn't come to us through the senses—precisely, the end is what is not there.
22:00 That's why I insist on my image of the warning sign for a stop. A sign points forward, 'over there,' but I don't see it yet, there's a stop sign. The end is what is not there. So it can only be signified. The end is meaning. If you want to remain a materialist, meaning cannot exist without a sign to carry it. Suppose I have a pure thought—that would surprise me—but there still have to be vibrations in the air for it to reach your ears. There's always a permanence of the material signifying support.
22:35 So for all these reasons, which are linked, you see, from the moment you make everything depend on abstraction, on sense-data, on immediate sensation—which is the case with the empiricists, you have to start, like Condillac, with the fact that at the outset there's only the smell of a rose, and everything must be built up from there, including my conception of God—well, the essential reason is the fact of setting the end aside.
23:09 Hegel makes a brief allusion to this in the preface to the Phenomenology, if I recall correctly, because he says that the banishment of all external finality—understood since the scientific revolution—has discredited the notion of end in general. But it must be rehabilitated in the sense in which Aristotle speaks of reason as the operation conforming to a goal. When we say a machine is rational, that means everything is well designed, or 'ergonomic' as we'd say today, in relation to the goal being pursued. And I insist on this, because it isn't said enough: it's what is not there, the end.
23:41 How can something that isn't there be there? How can it motivate me? You see what I mean? It's interesting, since we're among people I feel somewhat at home with—it's a bit like a metaphor for the difficulties encountered by the notion of universal gravitation with Newton. There were those who disagreed, who were excellent minds, excellent scientists of the time, but you have to understand that we had only just emerged, as I was saying, from the banishment of animal spirits and other pre-Galilean, pre-Cartesian superstitions, and suddenly here's a force acting at a distance—that's strange.
24:15 There were some who imagined invisible hooks going from the Earth to the Moon, I swear, there was a model of this kind at the time, little hooks, because there's no contact, attraction isn't mechanical. These problems aren't resolved—I imagine there are still people looking for particles of gravitation, I believe there's a notion called the graviton, isn't there? There you go, we've found it among the—ah, good, good, well, that interests me, you're certainly more up to date than I am on that, and I say this to tell you that gravity is one of the most complex notions in physics, by the way.
24:49 So, that's not my field, so I won't dwell on it too much, but I gave you this example to show that it's exactly the same kind of problem here. So when I say the end is what is not there, it's not meant to give a mystical, mysterious theory of the end—it's just as clear as the geometers' circle, as Plato says, which is intelligible—that doesn't mean it belongs to some high mysticism, it means it can only be conceived by the intellect, but certainly not seen with the eyes, and it can't be touched with the hands either—a circle, a circle as defined by mathematicians.
25:21 It's a creation of the mind, which makes us reflect on Ionesco's line—forgive me for lightening the mood a bit, but in passing, vis-à-vis a wonderful incident: 'Take a circle, caress it, it will turn vicious.' Ionesco. You see, you take a circle and caress it—well, it would have to have a certain thickness for that. That's not the case with the mathematical circle. So, simply put, when I say the end is what is not there, but what is there is a sign that signifies it.
25:54 For me, that reminds me of something, which is language. We're in the world of language, you see, we make use of signs. What allows me to make present something that isn't there? I say to you "panther," but there's no representation in your head. The panther isn't there. It is there, supposedly there, thanks to language. You see, I think I said this in another context, but the Greek term for sign is séma, which gives us semantics, semaphore, whatever you like, semiology.
26:27 And, from Antiquity onward, people made the pun—Plato does it several times, it's in the Gorgias, it's in the Phaedo. Sema, Soma, is the body, psychosomatic. That is, the sign is a tomb. Sema, Soma, the body—for Plato, the body is the tomb of the soul, of course. So what is a sign? If we forget that it's there to signify something that isn't there, it's nothing but a corpse.
Naive finalism and displaced end: Spinoza, Pascal 26:57 So don't forget Sema, Soma. The problem is very much of our time. That's why I'm counting a lot on your question. Because, just as imposing a finalism on nature—even one as stupid as, it's rare for me to criticize authors ad hominem, but he wrote excellent things elsewhere, yet here—really, what's his name, the disciple of Rousseau?
27:29 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who explains to us that the melon, the existence of the melon, proves divine providence. Because it's already predesigned, you see, so that we can share it out. He hadn't thought that some melons have seven segments, which doesn't work out evenly. It's absurd. Anyway. There are people like that who would have it that an effort spanning several millennia of humanity is unnecessary—it's already there, inscribed in the order of nature. Oh, look at the seashell, everything is already there, everything is organized, it's magnificent, an order, intelligent design. Do you find that today? It's as old as the hills, and they're passing it off as cutting-edge.
28:00 No, it's fine. But what is topical, on the other hand, is the fact that, you see, how ambivalent a notion this is. If someone asked me, are you a finalist? I wouldn't want to answer immediately with a simple yes or no, since that would be very philosophical. If the question means: do you think that when a stone falls, it's because somewhere it has a little desire to fall—I'd say no, not a finalist, there's no desire at all.
28:30 And I make the classic critique that you know, it's an anthropocentrism—it's the essence of man that has been alienated and put into things, as if things pursued goals the way men do. And this shows up grammatically too: when we say "it's raining," that recalls the era when it was a god who made it rain, etc., and so we still have personal pronouns even though I've been told they have an impersonal use in grammar. No—before, everything was animate. But wait, what am I actually saying? I haven't said that the notion of an end doesn't exist, that it's a chimera.
29:01 I'm saying that it's been displaced. That's not at all the same thing. I'm applying Spinoza's magnificent theory of error. It's one of Spinoza's great strengths. Don't forget he's a philosopher of pure positivity, there's no void in his system. Namely, error, says Spinoza, doesn't mean that I'm thinking of something that doesn't exist. Because Spinoza says that if we could think what doesn't exist, that would be proof of our power rather than proof of weakness. We are in error.
29:32 If we make an error, says Spinoza, it's because something in reality determines us to make that error. It's very pre-Freudian. But I displace it in Freud's terms. I displace this truth into another domain. Reality into another domain. It's a beautiful theory of error. And that's the case here. If, rightly, starting from the sixteenth century, from the scientific revolution—the scientific revolution, say, with Galileo, culminating with Newton, which immediately preceded the industrial revolution—we denounce these as a chain, the industrial revolution in England and the political one in France.
30:11 All of that packed into a very short span, and temporally too. Well, this scientific revolution, whose main act was precisely, as I was saying earlier, this—if I may use the barbarism—this de-animation of being, with the anguish it induces in modern man. When Pascal says "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me," Pascal is far more modern than some of our environmentalists today who see nothing but order and harmony in the cosmos, except for man who messes everything up.
30:50 I'm caricaturing them a bit, but that's what you hear most often. Whereas Pascal says: around us, do you really find order? We are in a small suburb of the galaxies. The silence—Pascal knew very well, he was a great scientist, that it's not there that one should look for God, in the galaxies or in the ammonia clouds. So, "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me" expresses an anguish specific to modern man, who would soon become the "man without qualities," as a writer, Musil, put it, faced with this loss of essence and substance.
From philosophical imperialism to scientific imperialism 31:33 This scientific revolution—this is the point I want to insist on—when it critiques anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and the teleology that accompanies them, what I call naive finalism, in short, external finality—it's for people, in the external world—it presupposes that there is indeed someone who pursues ends, but that someone is man, and this has been displaced, alienated onto the outside. But so the truth is to bring it back to man. If we start saying, in order to study man, that there is no finality, then the critique collapses.
32:06 Do you understand what I mean? In other words, the approach—ancient philosophy, to go very quickly—ruined any prospect of knowledge of nature, of physics broadly speaking, which includes chemistry and biology. Antiquity missed out on physics, even though it was way ahead in mathematics, because of its finalist approach to nature—explaining things through ends. One could call this the philosophical imperialism of that era. If you work on Aristotle, you see that philosophy is the general discipline, and physics, astronomy, are parts of philosophy.
32:40 Roughly, that's Aristotle. Plus a discipline proper to the philosopher, who studies being qua being. It's magnificent, the fourth book of the Metaphysics. Let me quote him, because it's clear: there is one science, and only one, that studies being qua being, and not being qua animate being—that's physics—being qua ensouled being—that's psychology, etc. But there's only one that studies being qua being. He says this in the fourth book of the Metaphysics, and it's the philosopher who deals with it.
33:12 He says all the other disciplines, each cutting out one part of being, reflect on the principles proper to that part. So, a magnificent image of the unity of the sciences—which won't last very long, by the way—whereas our modern world is completely split between the natural sciences and the human sciences, for instance. With, between the two, if we believe Kant, who is no small authority on the human sciences, an unbridgeable abyss—I quote Kant. You cannot, starting from equations or chemical chains, suddenly pass to the reason why Madame de Lafayette's heroine falls in love in The Princess of Clèves with...
33:45 Ah, darn, what's his name, the handsome guy? I must have found him too seductive, so I repressed it and forgot his name. Anyway, it'll come to me. And so, my point is, these aren't the same mechanisms, not the same procedures, not the same models. For instance, I often use this example because it's down to earth and so everyone shares it. When I say: serve someone else first at the table, that runs counter to the instinct, to the determination that pushes me to eat when I'm hungry.
34:18 Even the most adorable dog bares its teeth when you approach its bowl while it's eating. And you'd hardly see it say to another dog, "please, help yourself first, old chap." It's unthinkable. It really takes another logic, even an inverse logic. Same for sexuality and so on, I won't go over it again. "Be fruitful and multiply" from the Bible is more in keeping with natural law—growing and multiplying—than the institution of monogamous marriage.
34:51 I have nothing against it, I'm not making value judgments here, especially not. Because the moment I introduce the framework of monogamous marriage, it's a limit on being fruitful and multiplying in all directions, with multiple partners, as was once the case. So, in my view, nowadays, thought and philosophy—I'm speaking a bit loosely here, but it's a discussion we'll flesh out—nowadays, we're living a symmetrical imperialism.
35:24 So, to sum up: philosophical imperialism in Aristotle's time, where philosophy has to deal with everything, all the disciplines. Then, starting with Galileo and Descartes, it's the opposite—a scientific imperialism begins, and philosophy is gradually stripped of everything it had, so to speak, unduly appropriated. To the point that even Hegel was somewhat ironic about the English, who spoke of "the philosophy of the parliamentary bill"—philosophy, back then, really was used for just about anything.
35:55 But finality was banished in order to build modern science—to go very quickly—and in this science that matters, the fundamental relation is the cause-effect relation. To go fast: in the natural sciences, the cause-effect relation—heat expands bodies. So y equals f of x, which is expressed in mathematics by the formula y = f(x); f can be a statistical function, whatever, I don't want to get too sophisticated, but roughly, these depend on those, the relation of functional dependency, as it's called in certain mathematical theories—that's it.
36:40 And so, you see, we find Descartes' chains again. Dependence, depends on, is determined by, is a function of, corresponds to—when Marx, in the passage with the most maxims per line, in the famous 1859 preface, says: in the social production of their existence, men enter into necessary relations independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a determinate stage of development of their material productive forces.
37:14 He's saying that y, the relations of production, the political systems for example, is a function of, corresponds to another variable, which is the development of the productive forces, such that, to go a bit fast, the hand-mill gives feudalism, the steam-mill gives the bourgeoisie, roughly speaking. So there you have it. This approach, the cause-effect pairing, I set—well, I oppose it to the pairing that should govern in the human sciences, which is the sign-meaning pairing, I'll come back to that.
Freud listens instead of observing 37:48 Which is not at all the same thing. Starting from a sign and seeking its meaning means implying an intention, a will—one might say, in Husserl, an intentionality. It's interesting. And that is not at all the same as observing strictly mechanical relations in an empirically given reality. You see, it's almost the opposite. Let me take, for this, the example of the origins of psychoanalysis. How was it constituted at the outset?
38:18 At the start, this wasn't a problem for a philosopher, still less for a metaphysician—there was no one less metaphysical than Freud in his studies, like almost all scientists of his time. His training: biology, physiology, medicine, anatomy, etc. And by the way, his doctoral thesis, interestingly, was on the effects of cocaine, to become a doctor. He was always interested in pain and pleasure—pain and pleasure go together, cocaine. So what interests me is that before Freud, psychiatry consisted in—I return to our whole discussion through this example—observing the patient.
38:58 So there's a relation of exteriority: the sick person, the patient. And the madman, as they said at the time, the alienated one, the insane, the one deprived of sense—the insensé. And in German, the same, Wahnsinn, meaning-gone-vain, it comes down to the same. And Sinn is sense/meaning. And as with us in German, it means sense both in the sense of smelling, with the nose, but also in the intellectual sense of the term, as the antonym of sign. Well, before, one observed, one didn't listen.
39:32 We're not going to listen to a discourse that has no meaning. It's like a machine gun talking. That was the view of doctors at the time, of psychiatrists. We're not going to listen to a discourse that makes no sense. So if a guy tells me he's Napoleon and he's dressed in rags. I don't listen to him. Instead, I try to look at the third temporal lobe, etc. I'm alluding to Broca's area—it gives a street name in Paris. And I observe him. He's treated as a thing. And it's clear that the more I observe him, the more I abstract from what isn't there.
40:09 If, say—I'm just making this up—his mother-in-law, let's not say I'm being misogynistic, or his father-in-law, gives him ulcers or gastric hyperacidity, that's not there. Precisely because it's relational, and that I can't see. You see, that's my example. Freud does exactly the opposite. He doesn't observe him. He turns his back on him. On a couch. I'm simplifying, okay? And he listens. He even listens in order to hear what isn't said. Yes? But what isn't said, in the saying of it.
Determinism and finality: evil, the eternal return 40:39 Because otherwise it would be easy. But the problem is that Samuel's unsaid and mine aren't the same. We still need words to guess at them. We have to restore some of what is said in order to find, so to speak, the unsaid within it. So when I say that we abstract away the end, and that this is one of the great handicaps of contemporary thought—making us believe that every time we introduce an end and a purpose, we're falling back into the mystical, the religious, the metaphysical, the outdated, the old-fashioned. There's a scam going on there.
41:10 I'm not settling the debate between determinism and finality. I'm a dialectician, I think the question is badly posed when it's posed like that. But I'll point out, for those who want precise references, that this problem, which has of course concerned philosophers for a long time, because behind it lies the moral problem, the problem of evil. For instance, if God exists, how can evil exist? If he's all-powerful, it's even more unforgivable that evil exists. Whereas the ancient gods, who aren't very committed in the face of destiny, and who are ready to abandon everything for the first well-built nymph they meet—that's not quite the same as transcendence.
41:42 So if he's all-powerful and has existed for an infinity of time, and evil still exists, something's wrong. And especially thoughts like eternal return—another parenthesis within the parenthesis, I'm not talking about poor Nietzsche, I say poor Nietzsche affectionately, not with contempt. But the sub-Nietzschean post-'68ers, I mean, what does eternal return even mean? You know, the law of large numbers is interesting—it's the best way to support, seriously, scientifically, the cycle of eternal return.
42:19 What are the chances that if you toss a coin like that, tac, it lands right on its edge on the ground? Almost none. No, not in 10 throws, no, not in 100 throws, not in 1,000, a million, 10 million—it won't happen. But when the number grows large—the law of large numbers, you know this better than I do. Well, it works very well for the materialist explanation of the world, I say this to be honest. If there's an infinity of elements, atoms, we say particles today, over an infinity of time, all the combinations have already occurred.
42:54 The ones that produce gold, paper, the passion of Tristan and Iseult, and the sinking of the Titanic. Now, I'm willing to entertain this thought, it's a bit dizzying, but still, it means—yes, there are the idiotic thoughts of progress, the people of the left, and then we find Nietzsche. And then there's eternal return, serious matters, tragic thought. What does it mean? It'll come back, there's no problem, it has to come back. You have to accept it, those who talk like that have to accept it. Eternal return. Men's suffering—no big deal, it'll come back.
Leibniz and the Phaedo: that without which the cause would not be a cause 43:27 So there. There's a great handicap in contemporary thought: banishing, immediately connoting as religious and mystical, anything that smacks of teleology or finality. And so I wanted to give you a precise reference, since the problem has existed for a long time—we find it in Leibniz, who very rarely refers to other authors. You know, you have to wait for modern philosophy, Kant, Hegel, etc., after the French Revolution, to start seeing philosophers cite one another; otherwise, you see, Descartes doesn't cite many people.
43:58 Well, Leibniz makes an exception in the Discourse—Treatise or Discourse on Metaphysics—Discourse on Metaphysics, that little concentrate, that marvelous concentrate, you find it published by Vrin, of Leibniz's thought, one of the greatest minds of all time. I don't know, it's maybe 80 pages, and he manages to pack everything in. At one point, he cites Plato, very rare. And what does he cite? The passage that's at the heart of our discussion. And he cites this passage from the Phaedo—not the same one I quoted earlier—where Socrates says the following.
44:30 "In fact, I had heard of a book written by someone who was going to explain everything to me starting from the nous." The nous. Let's translate it for now as intelligence, to go quickly. That's where noumenon comes from, in Kant, it comes from Nous, but the root NO is also in "notion"—simply, everything that can be noted by the mind, the noosphere, you know it. I even think one of the first cable television channels was called Nous.
45:00 So he says, I had heard of someone—it's Anaxagoras. It's Anaxagoras, the first to say that the origin of everything that exists is not water, fire, the void, or atoms as with Democritus, or becoming as with Heraclitus, or the being of Parmenides, but intelligence. And that already pleased me greatly. And that's where we see the finalist side of the nous, because it means he thinks this world is organized, since it comes from someone intelligent, that it's not due to chance, that if a mountain is there, it's because there's a reason, there's a cause behind it.
45:30 And so I was eager to get hold of his book. And I was very disappointed on opening it, because I find someone talking to me about causes like air, gravity, pressure. It's interesting, it's already the debate over positivism. And he says, in short, and this is where it gets interesting, it's exactly as if, to the question "why am I sitting here"—let's not forget this is a dialogue taking place with Socrates, living out his last hours with his disciples in his prison before taking the hemlock.
46:00 "Why am I sitting here?" He would answer: because your body is made of bones and muscles, that the two are connected by tendons, that they have the property of bending, and that's why you're sitting here. They say that's not false. But there, you see, and this is where Plato is very strong, they're not giving me the cause. They're telling me about that without which the cause could never be a cause. That's powerful, Plato—that without which, matter. Plato's no fool.
46:30 That without which the cause could never be a cause. You see? When Darwin says that when we're happy, we smile like this, in some way—it's very striking in Darwin—there's the baring of teeth of pain, the satisfaction of mammals who have eaten, etc. It's true, in a way, that there is always a material given by our natural origin. Yet trying to explain Iseult's smile when she sees Tristan by reference to a predator's canine teeth...
47:04 That's a bit reductive, but it doesn't explain much. So, there you have it. You see, I've circled around this notion of an end. We must banish the naive notion of an end, an end that's already there, independent of any human initiative, of course, which would give a world, ultimately, that's teleological, immanentist, and animist regarding the end—one that has to be assumed, that is, that follows from a free decision. Which is not at all the same thing.
47:37 And Socrates says: the real reason is that I had an opportunity to escape. You know, it's well known. In Greece, if you had a bit of money, you could buy off a guard, pay a bail, etc. And I refused. Because I spent my life seeking the sense of the order of the city. It's not on the day I'm condemned that I'm going to set an example of subversion. And so the real reason why I am sitting here is that I willed it. It's not that my bones can bend. But it's true that if I didn't have these bones and these muscles, I couldn't be sitting here.
Privation of end; Fabre's chalicodoma; end and subject 48:08 without which the cause would never be a cause. It's the means. It's not the end, it's the means, quite simply. You see how complex and fascinating this discussion on determinism and finality is. I think the two are not at all incompatible. Even if we are determined, I'll say - I'm doing a little synthesis of the two points of view now, because there are still people today who maintain, even some more than there used to be - I'm thinking of those who work in the so-called cognitive sciences - who would like to make you say that the discussion we're having now, in fact, that I'm scratching my head over, all that is a series of determinations that neither I nor you ever thought of.
48:51 We're a kind of blind mechanism, sounding bodies that resonate, as we said about Kafka's characters - bodies that resonate. And this privation of end is, in my opinion, at the neuralgic center of philosophical discussions and therefore, ultimately, political ones - I'm thinking of today's crisis. I said privation of end; I'm borrowing this vocabulary from Aristotle, who distinguishes privation from negation - it's a fine achievement.
49:26 A blind man is deprived of sight. Why? Because a blind man is a man, and man is supposed to see, so he is deprived - it's part of his essence, the essence of man, to see. So blindness is a privation. You can't say that this book is deprived of sight. That's a negation. Sight is negated of the concept of a book. There you go. So when I tell you we are deprived of finality, that means exactly what it says, doesn't it? It's not just about wanting to reduce us to the level of the beast, it's reducing us to pebbles rolling down a mountain.
50:02 You see, doing that has no end whatsoever. So, back to my point. Even if we are entirely determined, the fact of being able to become aware - and not just aware, but to have knowledge, to pass from consciousness to science - these determinations, I mean, completely change the terms of the problem. The Moon cannot free itself from the Earth's gravity, precisely because it doesn't think, because it doesn't reflect - that's where we see reflection at work. I'll take a second example, different from the Moon, borrowed from biology rather than astronomy.
50:34 The mason bee of the walls. Do you know this creature? Neither did I, but I heard about it in the great entomological works of Jean-Henri Fabre, who was a great entomologist of the late nineteenth century and who observed the behavior of the mason bee. It's a kind of masonry wasp - you know, the little wasps that make things out of earth. He observed this precise detail: to gather its food supplies, it proceeds in two stages, clearly separated. First it goes to the back of the little cell made of earth to regurgitate its crop there.
51:06 To regurgitate what it has accumulated as food. Then it backs out, very precisely, ruffling its wings to shake off the pollen load, as he puts it. Having watched this process happen several times, he decided to interrupt it between the first and second phase using a little straw, a little twig. The wasp has just regurgitated its crop, and just as it's about to ruffle its wings, he blocks it. What does it do? It goes straight back to the rear.
51:37 It regurgitates its crop again, empty this time. It comes back out, he blocks it again, and the same thing happens again. And the operation can be repeated as many times as the observer wants. This is proof that there is no thought involved. Can you imagine women drawing water from a well that has sand at the bottom, and spending the whole day at it? If they became aware of it, they'd say, what on earth am I doing here? Even as a slave, it's not worth it, there's no water. This means a program is running, and if you block part of the program, you have to reinitialize it, as they say, and start the whole thing over from zero - of course.
52:12 So it's pointless to invoke a finality to explain the bee's behavior. It's a mechanism unfolding. And this is where you see - now I'm getting serious - that bringing in finality, thought, reflection, presupposes a subject. That's what is being denied through this negation. And we can even reverse it: from the moment there is finality, there is a subject. Only a subject can represent an end to itself. Only a subject, that is, a someone and not a something, can represent an end.
Empiricism, rationalism and Cratylus's silence 52:50 There you go. I went on a bit long for that question, but it's tied to one of the topics that runs through the whole history of thought. Let me recall that empiricism starts from things, from the immediate relation to things, in particular through the senses, to go quickly. Rationalism starts from words. All mathematicians agree with the first statement of the Gospel according to Saint John - though I don't know if mathematicians are aware of it. In the beginning was the Word. In mathematics, we begin with statements.
53:21 If there are no definitions, no axioms, or postulates, there's no point continuing. So, empiricism starts from things, rationalism starts from words. You'll remember I said earlier that thanks to the senses, we mustn't scorn empiricism - we have access to reality. Except that when we get a bit closer to it, this reality is so shifting and in constant becoming that we can't formulate any truth about it. That's where we see the difference between the notions. I'm glad to have a reality, but I can't say anything about it.
53:51 I can't make a statement that corresponds to it. You see, here I'm playing the skeptic's game. Including Cratylus - I don't know if you remember, I mentioned him before, it always makes me laugh because it's profound. It's Aristotle who cites him, since we've lost the texts of these people. Fortunately they're quoted from time to time, so we get an idea of their thought. But Aristotle, arguing against the skeptics, says at one point: well, one must be consistent. If you're a skeptic, you have to do as Cratylus did - a disciple of Heraclitus, for whom everything flows - and therefore you cannot speak, because as soon as you speak, reality has already falsified what you were saying.
54:26 I say Socrates is young - he has already aged by the time I say it. So, the Greeks were quite something. And so he ended up falling silent, according to the legend - Cratylus - and just moved his finger. He pointed at things. You see, that's the height of empiricism, the act of pointing. Index, to indicate - that's where it comes from. I can only point to what is here, this, and now. So an end - that's not the moment. It's not with my finger that I'm going to point to an end. I can only point to means. But, yes, it's a limit case, yet at the same time he pays homage to him, because at least he's a consistent skeptic.
55:00 It's the skeptic who speaks and demonstrates and absolutely wants to be right, without noticing the inconsistency of his position. Because he's laying claim to a truth that he is in the process of denying. So, once we've gotten past this kind of difficulty - the dogmatist says he knows everything, the skeptic says we can know nothing. I already told you that the two have in common that they spare themselves the essential thing, which is work.
55:31 There's one who decides, while staying in bed, that his domain, his garden, is too overgrown, and there's no need to take inventory of it. You see, no - you have to go all the way and see whether there's a limit before deciding there is one. So it's important to note that one of the strengths of skepticism was precisely that: the critique of the notion of an end.
Determinism and the principle of non-contradiction 56:01 And to get back to my broad divisions - so, with empiricism, we're in contact with reality but unable to state any truth about it. With rationalism, we finally have truths - theorems, demonstrations - that verify the definitions, for example, truths. But then I always ask myself whether that corresponds to a reality. Let me remind you that I can say that a castle with 2 million pieces has twice as many as a castle with 1 million.
56:31 None of that exists, but the sentence is rigorously true. You see the disjunction between truth and reality - truth clearly lies in words. Reality is another matter; we always come back to this division between language and being, between logos and being. There is truth only of a discourse. If I say "book," I haven't said anything true or false. If I say "the book is a mammal," then we can consider whether it's true or false. There's already a combination, a relation, a link with another concept - an isolated concept, an isolated bit of empirical fact.
57:03 There is neither true nor false there - that's the real. And so, you see, we had a little crisis, damn it: with one we have reality, with the other we have truth. If we could have both, that would be even better. And then along comes the stage of determinism, which decides - and this is a very interesting idea - to return to the real, the real that the empiricist was dealing with, but by way of the long chains of reasons, as with Descartes for the rationalist, in order to say what?
57:33 That reality is made of events that link together with exactly the same necessity as the theorems of a theoretical model. Yes, that seems obvious to you. It's practically what gives us the modern world. It's what allows us to predict eclipses. So here, it's no longer the chaining of propositions - it's the real that obeys this chaining. That's my point.
58:03 I'm not against it either. I'm quite pleased about it. But you don't realize what a leap this is. If you don't see the problem, you'll never grasp the solution. It's easier to understand a solution than to understand what the problem is. Here, apparently, there is none. What's happening is that we're saying reality conforms to the laws of language. Yes, that explosions in distant galaxies follow a logic that is that of non-contradiction. That's what mathematics is. You see, if the human or social sciences - it doesn't matter, I mean, let's say the disciplines dealing with these things that aren't as scientific as we'd like - lean on the natural sciences themselves, which are hard sciences, which in turn lean on mathematics, which leans on foundations that are logical, common disciplines.
58:53 It remains the case that these foundations are foundations of a logical order, not of the real order, to begin with. For there to be contradiction, which underlies all mathematical thought, that's stated for the first time in the fourth - it's decidedly this fourth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics that's important, it's often quoted, because the three preceding ones give a bit of the history of his predecessors on the question - he gets to the heart of the matter. It really is the first treatise of metaphysics in history.
59:23 Let me open a small parenthesis for those who don't know: metaphysics isn't a word of Aristotle's - it was his disciples who, in the library afterward, saw that the master's works dealing with what we now call metaphysics were placed spatially after the Physics in his library, hence metaphysica, which corresponds fairly well to the notion, but he himself used the term "first philosophy," the philosophy of what lies at the foundation of first things. And Descartes takes this up, because what we translate as Metaphysical Meditations, in the original Latin text, is Meditationes de prima philosophia. So Aristotle states this principle which underlies our whole scientific culture - it doesn't exist without it - and mathematics especially.
1:00:06 It's the famous principle called the principle of identity, or of non-contradiction - it amounts to the same thing, whether stated positively or negatively. So I'll state it, because he has a principle - he says it's the only axiom that must be accepted between interlocutors. After that, we can discuss whatever we want, but if we can't agree on that one, there's no point - that's where he does battle with the skeptic. So here it is, I'll state it - it's a bit solemn in Aristotle: two opposite attributes - hot, cold, heavy, light - cannot belong at the same time to the same subject under the same respect.
1:00:40 That's the definition of the principle of identity that governs us at every moment without our noticing it. So you see, we need to look at this closely. The word "same" appears three times: two opposite attributes cannot belong at the same time to the same subject under the same respect. Let's apply it, because it will become plain French. Socrates is old, Socrates is young - that's contradictory. Those are two opposite attributes for the same subject. It's not contradictory if we say one is 20 years old, the other 60. So it has to be at the same time - first condition.
1:01:12 That's important. Next, it has to be of the same subject. We're indeed talking about Socrates in both cases. And under the same respect. He thought of everything, Aristotle. Because you could say, well, Socrates is old in terms of age or his arteries, but he's bursting with youthfulness, he has a youthful spirit. It has to be under the same respect too. All three conditions must be met for us to really be able to speak of coherence, or conversely, of contradictory propositions, statements.
Kant: determined nature and the subject's freedom 1:01:48 Once we state this principle, we have a common body of work, if you will, shared by philosophers who don't shut themselves up in the skeptical silence we mentioned earlier, Cratylus's silence, but also by the mathematician, the logician, and so on. So, to plunge back into the heart of your question - in the past, finality was banished, and Kant is so concerned not to fall back into the old delusions that he discourages - since you seem familiar with this line of thought - he discourages any metaphysical aim that would try to explain the existence of God through the order of things, as I was talking about earlier regarding providence, or through what was called the proof from effects in classical theology or metaphysics.
1:02:44 So Kant is thoroughly in step with the scientific progress of his time, and God knows he worked at it - he himself produced a work of astronomy, you must know, in which he has one of the earliest visions of the solar system, quite advanced for his era, broadly speaking, on the genesis of the solar system. And that was the fashion at the time - the Enlightenment philosophers all had a hobby, a scientific pastime. Voltaire had his little chemistry workshop, Rousseau had botany, Montesquieu had physics, and so on.
1:03:16 And the Encyclopédie itself, their collective masterpiece - don't forget it was an immense operation of didactic popularization, of popular education, I'd say today. A masterpiece of its kind. Now, Kant returns - and this answers your question directly - to the concept of end, in his last work, not in the first Critique - no question of putting ends back into the order of nature.
1:03:46 Newton's world suffices to explain nature, except for objects approaching something like the speed of light - but that was a bit early to know about, roughly speaking. And then, there's the moral law within my heart. That's kept quite separate. The question "what must I do" doesn't depend on the physical or chemical experience of one thing or another. We're certainly not going to look in nature - that is, the world of the determined, as we just saw, the world where everything is linked in a chain, to use the metaphor - that's not where we're going to look for the source of freedom.
1:04:20 Freedom is within me, or nowhere - I mean, within us, in the subject, or nowhere. It's all a bit harsh, this - it's the somewhat rigorist side of Kant, stemming from a Germanic Puritan culture, Pietism, without giving you a whole history lesson, but there you go - quite in keeping, for now, with what we know... At times, when you read Kant, you wonder whether you're only free when you don't do what you want, almost - to the point that you're free when you do what displeases you, but out of discipline, something like that.
1:04:52 And that's a bit of a caricature, isn't it? And then, all of a sudden, out comes the Critique of Judgment, to throw a kind of frail bridge over what he had called the unbridgeable abyss, between pure reason and practical reason - that is, between the answer to the question "what can I know," which is his own approach, and the answer to the question "what must I do?" After all, the kingdom of heaven, as he'd learned in catechism, is not closed to children. Moral salvation is not reserved for the most learned.
1:05:23 He is indeed... You see, we always come back to either this conjunction of wisdom and knowledge, or a disjunction, especially in Christianity. There's a humiliation of reason and of the scribe in the Christian tradition - you see - of the intellectual, if you will, in the abstract sense of the term. Quite the opposite of ancient Greece, if you will. There the philosopher is almost a demi-god.
1:05:53 Plato had such prestige that once, Diogenes Laertius reports, his toga slipped slightly on his thigh, and it was revealed that he had a golden thigh. No, sorry, that's Pythagoras. It's a legend that circulates about Pythagoras. Yes indeed, such was the prestige these people had - Pythagoras supposedly had a golden thigh. There you go. Even Sophocles and Aeschylus were like demi-gods to the city, whereas in the modern world, people like Baudelaire and Rimbaud were cursed by the city. It's much the same for philosophers. So, why does Kant bring theology back onto the agenda?
1:06:26 Because it bothers him himself, his own system - this unbridgeable abyss that gives an impression of incompleteness in his system, this break between theoretical reason, which I've talked about enough - if, then, y equals f of x, so that it's realized like that - and practical reason, which presupposes a freedom, and that has nothing more to do with blind causalities. And, lo and behold, he concentrates his reflection on this frail bridge, on a new category of judgment.
Kant's pairs of judgments 1:06:57 It's the aesthetic judgment I'm talking about, because the Critique of Judgment, or of the faculty of judging, is the first modern philosophical aesthetics - let's not forget that. When students came to see Hegel saying, I don't know where to start in philosophy, I'm lost, and so on, Hegel had them start with the Critique of Judgment. You remember. You see, I often criticize Kant and Hegel, but as for the Critique of Judgment, I have nothing but respect. Precisely because of its synthetic character. Indeed, what does it say in it?
1:07:29 He introduces a new pair of judgments. Let me explain. Kant progresses each time by discovering pairs of judgments. All of pure reason is based on the opposition, as you know, between synthetic judgments and analytic judgments. Let me quickly recall that a judgment is analytic - every judgment consists in linking a predicate to a concept. "The book is dirty." The predicate is "dirty." The subject is "the book." So every judgment consists in linking a predicate, an attribute, to a subject.
1:08:02 Only, this can happen in two ways, says Kant. Either the attribute is already contained in the subject. For example, "the triangle is a polygon." Obviously, in the definition of triangles it's already there - it's a closed polygon with three sides, or with three angles, whatever. And the circle, the locus of equidistant points, the same points, the same planes. Whenever it's determined, I have my definition. You'll notice, by the way, that "determined" and "defined" - in French, déterminé and défini - are basically the same thing.
1:08:32 That's indeed the case. It's finished (fini). And that's why we should avoid starting with a definition. It's only once it's finished that we get the right definition. What does aesthetics have to do with this, you ask? Because, I repeat, in the realm of knowledge there was the pair analytic judgment and synthetic judgment. Analytic judgment: the predicate is contained in the subject. "The dog is a mammal" - that's in its definition. On the other hand, if I say "this dog is yellow," I can't say that yellow is contained in the concept of dog. I could turn the concept of dog over every which way - there's no necessity that yellow be in there.
1:09:03 So, a dog can be yellow. For that, I need experience. You see? It's not part of the concept of dog. So that's a synthetic judgment. The problem is that analytic judgments are extremely rigorous. "The triangle is a polygon." "The dog is a mammal." But they don't teach me anything, don't tell me much beyond what I already knew. To analyze is precisely that - to take apart. I take apart the car sitting in my basement. I'm a weekend tinkerer. I can lay out all the parts on the floor, but they're the same ones that were already in the car.
1:09:33 There's nothing new there. That's it. Analysis brings nothing new. I'm just putting in order everything I already knew. My thoughts were up in the attic, and I bring them down and arrange them a bit in the living room, in the order of reasons, to speak like Descartes. Whereas synthetic judgment relates concepts that weren't necessarily connected, like dog and the color yellow. The ideal, says Kant, would be to be able to extend our knowledge - which is what synthetic judgments do, a dog can be yellow - but with the rigor of analytic judgments.
1:10:05 All right? That's really what's at stake in Kantian epistemology. So much for pure reason - I'll leave it there. We'll soon have occasion to come back to the solution he proposes. His moral philosophy, the Critique of Practical Reason, is likewise a pair of judgments. There's the hypothetical imperative. What must I do if I have a toothache? Ah, there's a hypothesis - you go to the dentist, of course. That's the hypothetical imperative. And then there's the categorical imperative. There's no hypothesis anymore.
Determining judgment and reflective judgment 1:10:35 The moral law: respect, act with the other as if a universal maxim should follow from your action, and so on. So, very well. But there's a whole world between the two, between the cognitive world and the moral world, we come back to the same rupture. And then, in the last part of his life, the last and most subtle of these distinctions of judgment that he introduces in the Critique of Judgment, is the one between judgments—the second, the reflective judgment, the first, the determinant judgment, and the reflective judgment.
1:11:10 So, you're going to see how we got to aesthetics, because for now, we weren't there yet. I'm going back a bit though. Philosophy of knowledge, Critique of Pure Reason. I said it earlier, the essential pair is cause and effect in knowledge. Two-thirds of pure reason tries to grapple with the principle of causality. There, it's the true and the false that matter in knowledge. Then, moral philosophy, there it's good and evil. That has nothing to do with true and false. And there, we'll see the beautiful and the ugly in aesthetics.
1:11:41 Which is yet another thing entirely. Or the principle, as he first says, of pleasure and pain. We'll see afterward what is specific about aesthetic pleasure, which intrigues him. It's quite intriguing because we know the pleasure of eating when we're hungry. That's not very surprising. Pleasure in such things is not so surprising either. But this, which merely appears, which I don't consume. And in reflecting on the specificity of the judgment of taste, as he calls it, the aesthetic judgment—don't forget there is no established aesthetics yet in his time. He will be the first to propose a systematic one.
1:12:13 It's starting from the judgment of taste that he formulates this new pair of concepts. So, I come back to the determinant judgment, the reflective judgment. What does this mean? He recalls that every judgment consists in associating, as I was saying earlier, an attribute to a subject. Carrying out a relation. In every judgment, there is a pair, a division, a split. In this case, aesthetic judgments are part of value judgments.
1:12:43 Do you agree? It's beautiful, it's ugly—that's a value judgment, not a judgment of existence. This table measures two meters, that's a judgment of existence. This table is really well made, or it's wobbly. That depends on what I want to do with it, it's a value. Same for the stadium—I think I gave the stadium example—this stadium measures 600 meters, 400 meters the track. That's a judgment of existence; this stadium is well made—I don't know, do you want to play soccer or ice hockey, those aren't the same criteria, you see, that's a value judgment.
1:13:16 Because there, it works very well, it puts order into what we already knew, by the way. So he tells us that when we get to the aesthetic value judgment, all the other value judgments, other than aesthetic ones—say, this hammer, it's excellent quality, I'm going to buy it. There, I know why I say it's excellent quality, I know because I know what I want to do with it, which is hang my painting on the wall, and the fact that it doesn't break on the first hit, that the thing doesn't fall on my thumb on the first hit, etc. The hammer is well made, good quality. Good. That's because I know the purpose, that's what he calls the determinant judgment. The end is already given.
1:13:50 Whereas in reflective judgment, only the effect is produced—look, it's beautiful, but I can't say which desire that corresponds to. I can only reflect on what produced this pleasure, reflect on the object—why does this shirt please me? I'd say, there are cowboys chasing rabbits in the American prairie, maybe because I love the prairie, I love plants—but no, there's nothing there, there's nothing, there are stripes, not even stripes, colors—why do they please me? I can't immediately say, as with this or that, that it's because I wanted to do this and the road is perfect for going in a certain direction, or that this dentist is excellent and if you don't want a toothache anymore, you have to go see him.
1:14:29 There, we see right away the determinant judgment: I know the goal I want to reach and I organize my means accordingly. Whereas here, I first receive the effect—pleasure or pain, but here he's talking about aesthetic pleasure. And thinking about it, I can't help thinking, when I tell you this, about rats. I can talk about this because when we studied philosophy, when I was doing my philosophy degree, there was a year of general psychology and we would join those who were psychology students, experimental psychology, we observed rats in mazes. You could talk about this for hours outside class, but I'm boring you with my digressions—though the digressions of rats aren't bad either.
1:15:04 It happens that there was one—let's stick to that one—it's the experiment on the arousal of males from the smells of females that were communicated to them from one cage to another. And by the way, I learned at that time, I'll come back to my example after, that when a male in heat receives the smell of other males, it immediately inhibits him, he no longer has any libido, nothing at all. As if, well, the species reproduces without me, that's fine, I mean, next time.
1:15:36 But what I wanted to tell wasn't that. There's one where they put electrodes on its kidneys—sexual arousal. It does this, it stops immediately and goes back to the spot where the button was pressed, as if it were tied to the place. You know, it's cute, all the same. There you go. And the fact that I say it's beautiful, I can't say it the way I did for the hammer—well yes, because I wanted to hang my painting. Of course, people will tell me, well listen, I say it's beautiful because I like it—yes, but you're just repeating the same thing twice.
1:16:12 That's not a tautology. And it pleases me, why? Because it's beautiful. Well yes, we agree. I didn't tell you it's not beautiful, I respect taste, and besides, I also find it so, that's not the question. But what makes you find this beautiful and not that? Ah, but it's because there's red. Yes, we're starting, we have to reflect, and that's what's fruitful. That will give rise to all the phenomenological movements afterward. The return to the things themselves, not injecting ideas into a text that aren't there, but being attentive to the slightest comma.
1:16:42 The signifier, we'd say in modern terms. We owe all this to the Kantian notion of reflective judgment. When I don't know the end, I have to reflect. The only clue I have is that. So, it's a bit humiliating for the subject. It means that to know myself, to know what I want, I have to interrogate an inert object. It knows more than me about me. Can you imagine? I didn't know I liked that, but it's the happiness I got from drinking too much.
Pleasure, desire and the unconscious: the legacy of the third Critique 1:17:12 I'm talking nonsense. You made me think, gosh, it's been a while since I thought about Vietnam, but that's it. Look, Proustian madeleine, never mind. You see, I had forgotten it was also important to me. I was born in Hanoi. But then, bang, the object knows more about me. It's extraordinary all the same. There's that in the notion of reflective judgment. And you understand well that the immense philosophical movement called German idealism, between Kant and Hegel, roughly Fichte, Schelling, Reinhold, etc.
1:17:42 And Hölderlin—we always talk about him as a poet, but let's not forget there's also philosophical production. And even in the latest studies, we've never been so well documented about that period, we increasingly reassess the influence Hölderlin had on certain aspects of the young Hegel's thought. I say specifically on certain aspects of the young Hegel's thought. Both of them were very impressed by Schelling, who was younger, but who was more brilliant, more publicized. But there was a friendship between Hegel and Hölderlin that was a philosophical and poetic complicity much more important.
1:18:17 So there you go, to tell you, this immense movement of German idealism that tried to raise art to the level of the absolute stems, in its wake, from the Critique of Judgment. Because thanks to aesthetic judgment, the judgment of taste, all of a sudden, you see how purpose starts to come back a little. If I feel pleasure, it's because a desire has been satisfied. There, I'm taking up the rigorous axiomatics again. If you take pleasure in drinking, it's because you were thirsty. The proof is that in the opposite case, drinking without thirst is an insult. It's an insult from Captain Haddock.
1:18:49 There you go. So I mean, don't confuse desire and pleasure. If the object that satisfies the desire isn't there, desire becomes a pain, a suffering. I'll limit myself for now to need, to simplify. There's nothing worse, believe me, than the need for water when water isn't there. I lived in sub-desert countries, people who died at 10 kilos, 200 meters from the paved road, but there's a sandstorm, they didn't see it, whole families sometimes. It's terrible, it's not like death by cold, which is delightful.
1:19:19 Yes, because we have hair standing up like this, dying of cold, we become numb, we no longer feel anything. I know, I nearly died of cold in the Drôme during the great snows, at the time, and at the moment I got a kind of drunkenness, I told myself it wasn't that cold, etc. And I started lying down on the snow, and it was my neighbor's moan—he was much heavier than me—and it was by going to help him that I saved myself. I was about to fall—it's the typical coma at minus 40, the mistral blowing down the Rhône valley on the snow, that's when I understood the retreat from Russia—that is, the retreat from Russia comes on very fast, whereas death by thirst is terrible.
1:19:57 Well, we find traces of those who drank the radiator water, and so, careful, I'm talking about aesthetic pleasure, not desire. Sometimes there was no desire at all, we're struck by music entering the street, etc., it's not consequent to a desire. So there is pleasure, or rather, the fact that there is pleasure, the existence of pleasure is the proof that a desire is satisfied.
1:20:31 Now, which one? That's where the question arises. After all, let's not forget that we're in a discipline, philosophy, which began with a Pythian imperative that said know thyself. We mustn't forget that. Leave the moons of Jupiter to astronomers, to physicists, but know thyself. Well, if you're not able to know what you want, that's still, for self-knowledge, that's fundamental all the same. Agreed? And in short, you see, I'm simply constructing a theory of the unconscious. That's what's at stake behind the notion of reflective judgment in Kant. Don't forget that categories and forms, a priori, in Kant, unfold without consciousness ever interfering, without asking consciousness for its opinion.
1:21:08 It's not consciousness that decided that we see everything through time and space. Our reason is made this way, our knowledge is made this way, that's how Kant puts it. Fine. This is what Lévi-Strauss will sum up by saying mental constraints, including himself in this. The a priori, the mental constraints. So, the fact that aesthetics comes back at the end of the eighteenth century, with Kant, that answers your question well.
Disinterested pleasure, objective morality and schema 1:21:38 It's that—what is the most cutting-edge thing in matters of knowledge at Kant's time? It's Newtonian physics. Now, if we listen to it, we must banish freedom from the world around us; it reveals, itself, the opposite. It's a world subject to an implacable determinism, especially since at the time we didn't yet know about quanta. Fine. And so, freedom had to either not exist, or come from elsewhere.
1:22:11 Since there's no theological solution in Kant in the dogmatic sense—Kant says it clearly, I wanted to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith—I didn't say he isn't religious. But there certainly isn't a doctrine of faith for him, something that could be taught, transmitted. There's no ontology of God and things like that for him, that's the old metaphysics. So, there was this intermediary which is the judgment of taste, the aesthetic judgment. Because after all, the others are interested desires. I want to hang my painting, I need a hammer, etc. Whereas here, I have a pleasure, and at the same time, curiously, it's a disinterested pleasure.
1:22:44 I watch a show, I watch The Magic Flute, which is contemporary with Kant's books. And there you go, it's not my personal interests, and the problem of the end resurfaces at that point. But not a conscious end that I pursue, an end that I would somewhat master, as we'd say today, which would allow me to look down on those who are ants guided by blind mechanisms, as if only I, the wise one—no, no, no, no. But ends, the only true ones, those that drive me, but which I don't discover simply through my conscious thought, but by reflecting on the flagrant evidence of where my desires invest themselves.
1:23:25 That's still a very modern approach. We're not far—and God knows Kant is a philosopher of the ought-to-be—we're not far from the Hegelian approach to being, from what Hegel will call objective morality, that is, studying mores to understand morality, what men have actually done. If there's polygamy here, monogamy there, there are reasons, it's the ancestor of sociology and all that, but I mean, these aren't caprices. In doing so, he stands in the wake of Montesquieu, you know, the admirable beginning of the preface to The Spirit of the Laws, when I set about examining men—that's the first sentence of that preface—who were not solely guided by their fancy.
1:24:10 Of course, someone like Pascal, from the previous century, who sees the absurdity of human conduct, will say truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on the other—what stupid legality that makes me legal on one side of the Pyrenees and not the other. But no, says Montesquieu, there is progress, there is the taking into account of history, and not only of the expanse of nature as in classical philosophy—namely, in a dry country, the arsonist should have a heavier penalty than in England, for example. You see? For example. It's logical that laws aren't the same everywhere, etc. There are things more or less serious depending on the context.
1:24:42 In short, laws have a context, and the spirit of the laws—that is, to Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, if we wanted to make a witty remark at the time, he made wit about laws. Well. And she was very sharp, seemingly effortlessly. And that gave rise to sixteen wasted hours on mathematics. There you go. To answer your question, very curiously, when least expected, Kant's severe research on causality—how is physics possible—then afterward, on how to derive a categorical imperative that allows freedom to exist, limiting knowledge to make room for faith.
1:25:16 And there you go, all of a sudden, there's the Critique of Judgment. And as I say, I can't find any other metaphor for it—he throws this frail bridge, but one that many people have crossed since, between pure reason and practical reason, between knowing and acting; there's this intermediary of the judgment of pleasure and pain. A bit, as Lévi-Strauss saw, it's a metaphor, between the raw—nature, the jaguar eats raw—and the cooked, there's fish Tahitian-style. Is that raw or cooked?
1:25:46 Not obvious. It's chemically cooked. A night spent marinating with lemon and so on, it's chemically cooked. The rotten, the fermented, you know, the green in Roquefort—the green has the green color because of the worm in the cheese, that's at my home in Corsica. Worms, w-o-r-m-s. But fermentation, in all human cultures, you have corn beer here, millet beer there, fermentation, rot, these are intermediate statuses, that's interesting. Between the purely natural, the raw and the cooked.
1:26:17 Well, that's a legacy of Kant. In Kant, as you know, those who know a bit of Kant, there's a word that does this... A word that allows what today we'd call an interface between two orders that have nothing to do with each other. To make a weld. The notion of—? You should know that. Schema. The notion of schema, like the schema of number, you who are a mathematician, which allows me to move from abstract quantity to definite quantity, etc. A schema is something homogeneous to two different orders.
1:26:49 Two orders even opposite, which shouldn't relate—the intelligible and the sensible, for instance. As I said earlier, language is a schema that allows what isn't there to be there. The word, for example. Well, that's a bit the status of the judgment of taste, of aesthetic judgment here. And why finality? I'll answer your question directly. Because it starts from a feeling of pleasure. If there's pleasure, it's because there's desire. Which desire? Ah well, it's because I wanted to hang my thing and I'm quite glad I didn't get the hammer on my nose.
1:27:20 Well, that's the determinant judgment. But why do you feel so good when Bach moves from F to F-sharp? I can't say it's because... I like the word sharp. I don't know. Actually, I don't know. Come listen to this, it's great, look at this passage. Yes, but yes, but I don't know. It's annoying. Because if it pleases me, it's indeed satisfying a desire that's within me and I don't know which one. Desire for F-sharp, at that moment. Or for F-natural another time. You see, it's interesting. As if the beautiful object, or ugly, wherever there's a value judgment, at that level, contains the answer to the question I'm asking myself.
Continuous and discontinuous: where to place the break 1:27:57 It will have to be questioned. There. That's roughly the answer. That was the spirit of your question. And so, the whole problem that has arisen since in the human sciences, namely natural sciences, human sciences or social sciences, however we should put it, comes from the issues we've just been stirring up. Either we move progressively from one to the other, Darwin-style for example. Or we establish a radical break somewhere. There's nothing... We always find continuous, discontinuous, old epistemic oppositions.
1:28:28 And the break will always be arbitrary. We can make a break somewhere between man and animal. To simplify, and to amuse myself too, à la Rabelais: laughter is unique to man. I'm not sure that's the right criterion, but well, why not. There you go. From the moment there's laughter, we're no longer in the animal. If someone tells me the chimpanzee disproves all that, maybe we make it laugh in our own way. Never mind. Then afterward, the break isn't animal/man anymore, it's the living/the inert. But it's the same thing. From what point do we go from a proto-organic macromolecule, I don't know how to put it, from amino acids, there, it's missing just a tiny bit to be a living molecule, gosh.
1:29:06 And how do we go from the inert to the living there? There you go. Some make it a continuous passage. Claude Bernard—the living is the dead. And then, there's another view. On the contrary, the theory of the break is rather religious. God breathes into the little statue of clay, Adam. Adam means the silt, the silt, the clay earth, Adama. Awa. Adam and Eve. Adama and Awa. There's a mineral water in Ivory Coast called Awa. That's where it comes from. Eve. It's water.
1:29:36 And so, there you go, the intervention is external. Let there be light, and there was light. There, we understand, there's a subject. It's coherent, in any case, let's say. Whereas, passing gradually like that means integrating the temporal dimension. We have to wait for modernity. We have to wait for modernity. Personally, if you ask my opinion, I think there's an evolution with thresholds, quite simply, as everywhere. Like the passage from unicellular to multicellular animals is a threshold in itself. Like the passage of reproduction from what's called—I'm forgetting my concepts—single-sex animals, that is, animals with only one sex. In short, the passage to sexual reproduction is also a threshold.
1:30:24 Well. So, it all depends on where we put the break. Just as, for example, between prehistory and history in general, we need to take the most convenient break, that's my answer. The most convenient in the scientific sense, that is, the one that accounts for the greatest number of facts possible, the one that is least reductive. And when we say it's writing that marks the passage from prehistory to history, that's the least foolish of answers. But we must know that as soon as we make a break somewhere, we are somewhat arbitrary with respect to what, in reality, is a continuum.
Cause-effect versus meaning-sign; sign and signal 1:30:56 That's what I mean. So we need to dialecticize a bit, continuous and discontinuous, to see whether there's a break between the natural sciences and the human sciences. As for me, here's the one I make. In the natural sciences, the cause-and-effect relation reigns. This is something personal that I'm proposing to you as a model. In the human sciences, there's the sense-sign relation. And why is there a huge stake in this distinction? It's because cause and effect can exert their effects, so to speak, even in the absence of any subject, in a universe where there is no subject at all.
1:31:32 Like the one that would follow a generalized atomic war. That's exactly the case. We were saying earlier that we're playing at total war. Or, on the contrary, well—here I quote Lacan, you'll see why, because I'm talking about sign and sense. His most interesting sentence, in my opinion: before signifying something, every word signifies for someone.
1:32:03 Before signifying something—I think the word 'before' is the most important. Because every word signifies both something and for someone. Roughly, here's the thing: I'm saying this to you, we're in a triangle, me, the thing, and the other. His point, he goes so far as to say 'before,' there's a priority. From the moment there's communication, it means I have a relationship to the other that is fundamental. Let's say the other is a woman on a train, I'm a fool telling her nonsense just so she doesn't get off at the next station, I'm talking just to talk, which is generally what smooth talkers do.
1:32:33 But what has meaning is the fact that I'm speaking to her. Lacan sums that up very well. So, if I apply that to what I'm saying, if the world of the human sciences is the opposition of sense and sign, that means what is fundamental in the human world is the relational. The sign is what allows one to signal to someone. To someone—don't confuse sign and signal. Any animal in the bush knows that smoke indicates there's a brush fire. That's a signal. Let me clarify the difference. In the signal, cause and effect are consecutive within the same here and now.
1:33:07 I smell the smoke, the fire is not far off. There is a real, causal consecution, if you like. Whereas between the word lion and the reality lion, there is no relation at all. The proof is that we use a different word in a different language, diarra, in Bambara, in Mali. That has nothing to do with Lyon. We'll say, the footballer, he's from there, he's Lyon, it's a very common surname over there. And that has nothing to do with it. The sign is conventional, it is not natural like the signal. Because it is by nature that smoke signals fire. It is not by nature that the five letters of the word Lyon, five or four, four, that the four letters of the word Lyon, that's not by nature, it's in relation to the animal in question.
1:33:50 You see? So, the sign already presupposes someone, for having given me the code, we are born into a world that speaks, we humans. We received speech from people who speak. And then we pass it on, as emitters and receivers of speech. And you see, Aristotle, man is zoon politikon, is a political animal, a social animal. Translate that however you like, politikon, among the Greeks, is an animal that lives in a city, in a community.
1:34:25 And so, it's connected. That's why I wanted to finish answering your question with this aspect, because — I'll end on this, I always end with the trickiest point, but also where the stakes are highest — there is the problem of the end, of purpose. I'll come back to it. But there is particular, individual finality and collective finality. We should start by distinguishing them.
Individual finality and collective finality 1:34:55 And, in principle, the notion — when we, in the social contract, speak of the general will, to speak of a collective end, a proverbial example. There, we have agreed, meaning that society, the actors of the contract, have agreed on certain purposes, on objectives to achieve, on a plan — to use a word that terrifies our liberal economists.
1:35:37 Yet, if there is an era that has lacked a plan, it is indeed today. And I mean, when I was 20, there was a planning commission in France. That wasn't the era when France's economy was doing worse. The fact of setting collective ends is a cultural achievement. I mean, you see, if we were — if one were an individual with no social input at all, one can be born of human origin and then be deprived of all human relation. Those are the feral children. That's the example we always take, unfortunately by accident, poor kids.
1:36:09 But we can clearly see the result, the fact that there is no language and that they can no longer acquire it, etc. If there is only the individual, the particular — I'm saying I'm driven by a set of biological, specific determinations, which the zoologist knows better than the philosopher. At the limit, the ethologist as we'd say today — and the collective almost become equivalent. To get out of mechanism and bring in ends, it must not be a personal end. A personal end has no meaning.
1:36:42 A personal tropism, yes, that has meaning. Given my own path, like each of us, I'm rather inclined to go this way rather than that, and drawn to this taste rather than that. But that is not the free part, the freest part of us. It only becomes free once we become aware of it and, almost with self-mockery, make fun of it. All right? Like Clouscard used to tell me — others, I'll finish on this, it will take time, you know her, I'm sorry. But we used to have lunch together fairly often.
1:37:13 He was rather tight with his money, coming from a rural background — my goodness, he taught me a lot in that regard. Me, having been raised in the woods, obviously, I didn't have... I'll give you the example. He tells me, at a little tavern when he's wrong, I say to him, what are you drinking? A quarter of red as usual. Me too, let's each get a half. He means a half, he's cheating you. We should each just get a quarter. I said to myself, if he knows better than me, after all, he was my elder, are there a few extra millimeters sometimes in a half? In fact, he had understood that I was going to swipe some from him.
1:37:43 He was better socially bred than me, he knew well that... there's someone who talks like that. Sorry, I grabbed the wrong glass, that happens to me often with Samuel. All right? There's still that grasping side, bourgeois ethology. We used to laugh about it. He told me it was the child of his upbringing. And he says, me, I'm so stingy that sometimes I have this paranoia at the restaurant, I always feel like I'm the worst served in the restaurant. Yes, we laugh about it. We become aware, and determinations, it's not serious — but they are individual. That's where I'm being serious.
1:38:13 I'll end on that. And so, for next time, it's worth reflecting on the mutual implication of the notion of end and the notion of the collective.
