English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The word "useless" in a high-school essay topic 0:00 I'd like to remind you that in these sessions I try not to set philosophers against one another — on certain points, yes, of course, but not philosophers against philosophers as such — insisting instead on what unites them as philosophers, and on what makes the philosophical field, philosophical questioning as such, specific compared to scientific questioning, religious questioning, moral questioning, etc. So that's still the heading, what is properly philosophical, and it's up to us to see whether this specific field is tenable or not.
0:39 I had taken the example, I'm still in the preamble, of a fairly classic essay topic often given to final-year students, in the style of, nowadays, has the evolution of the sciences and technology made philosophy useless? I don't know, some of you were there when I gave this example. It's clear that the majority of students — this can be shown statistically, it can be measured, there are docimological studies as they're called, on the science of examinations — most students will conscientiously try to define the two big, heavy words of the topic, science, technology, philosophy, well, the heavy words.
1:16 Sometimes with Wikipedia, sometimes on their own, which is better. Because these are terms that impress them a bit, being abstract — science, philosophy — which need defining. Without noticing that the word that poses the most problems philosophically speaking is precisely the one that goes unnoticed. Because it's common, because it's not technical: it's the word useless. Because, suppose someone answers yes. There you go, before we were savages, we were barbarians, we could still ask questions, now we know very well where the sun comes from, we're going to get accounts from Genesis.
1:53 Suppose that were the right answer. To say that this would make philosophy useless would reduce philosophical questioning to that of the CNRS. To — sorry — the questioning of the CNRS. That is, to research potentially into knowledge of the external world, why not, the orbits of the planets while we're at it. And to find out how many satellites there are around Jupiter — I'm not saying that isn't important. We wouldn't be here, starting with me, thinking the way we do, if all that hadn't happened.
2:23 Not at all. But I mean, the fields need to be clearly specified within their respective domains. And so it's this word useful that presupposes — we saw this last time too — that to know whether a thing is useful, the question makes no sense unless you specify the end, the goal being pursued. If instead of asking is philosophy useful, we asked is rain useful, you would very wisely answer that it depends.
2:56 If it's for the beachgoer, it's a catastrophe; if it's for the farmer, it can be a blessing. The same rain. So here, we're not talking about the objective properties of things, with words like useful, like sublate, like overproduce — I'll come back to that, it's topical — like overproduce. These are not objective, scientific terms. They belong more to value judgment, to the dictum of value, than to judgment of existence. And of course, if I say a dentist is useful when I have a toothache, there we go, I've specified the goal.
Development aid and the third world: the end belongs to the sovereign 3:31 If I want to make my pain disappear, then yes, the dentist is useful. Now, to find out, then, to sum up, whether philosophy is useful or not, I continue with my line of thought. My line of thought. We need to raise the question of ends. That's exactly what the sciences and technology don't ask themselves. You see, the good student is the one who saw that it's the word useful that poses the problem. To find out whether a thing is useful, it's precisely not scholars and technicians you should ask. I worked in the world of development, as it's poetically called, in diplomatic circles.
4:04 That is, in developing countries. The world supposedly of development aid. In fact it's aid to underdevelopment, as you know, because I've never seen one country help another become its competitor. Well. Have you ever seen that, in history? I never have. Developed countries — there are objective criteria for that. You shouldn't take it as a value judgment, it doesn't mean the most civilized, the most intelligent. In measurable terms, those where the share of industrial production overtakes agrarian production. That's not a very good criterion, actually.
4:35 You'd call underdeveloped, at the time we talked in these terms, those where agrarian production is still the majority, etc. So there are criteria, indices that can be combined here. In development economics, there was a time when people spoke of the Third World. You've heard that expression, the Third World. And implicitly, there was the capitalist world, the communist world facing each other at the time, and then there were the others.
5:07 In fact, there's a movement that was created at the time, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Bandung Conference, a project of interest — all that seems very far away now, it's non-aligned now. But if you analyze the expression, third is an ordinal number, not a cardinal one. It doesn't mean there are... it's not a word that designates three worlds. It's a word that designates one — but one that comes third. After the capitalist world, after the communist world. See how these are abstractions.
5:37 Where do we put Cuba? It's not in the Third World, since it's in the communist world, so it's in the two. West Germany would put it in the one, and so on. So in the end, the Third World empties itself of substance, you see, once you analyze it closely. There, that's the little aporia, quite simple, that starts from a run-of-the-mill topic like has the development of science and technology made philosophy useless? The right answer is the one that asks what useful means, that reminds us the word has no meaning unless you specify the end.
6:09 In terms of which a thing is judged useful or not. And that a reflection on ends necessarily steps outside the world of science and technology. That's why I made this detour through the world of development. Because I had, as a minister — these were sovereign countries, independent for several years, when I was in cooperation, in expatriation, as they say — I had a minister, a Tuareg, in Niger. It's topical. And he said to me, Dominique, for me, a good technical assistant — that's what they call it there, all those, good evening, all those on expatriate assignment who come to advise the people supposedly developing.
6:47 Sorry, I'm opening a parenthesis within the parenthesis, because I seem to be rambling a bit, but actually it's because I'm beating around the bush, and I'll be clear. I think development aid was purely political, not economic at all. Certain countries had to be prevented from falling into the opposing orbit, that's all. Once there's no more opposing side, we pull the aid out of Mali, etc., and put it into Hungary, Poland, Ukraine. 8 billion, the IMF recently, to Ukraine. The day before yesterday.
7:18 Good evening. On the other hand, when there was a danger that Mali or Ivory Coast might fall into the Soviet orbit, back when Angola fell into the Soviet orbit — it was huge, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, it was panic at the time. And since I lived through that atmosphere, south of the Sahara at the time, I remember it very well. So the minister, the national authority of an independent country, said to me, Dominique, for me the good technical assistant is the one who, if I want to jump out the window, reminds me of the law of falling bodies so I can choose the right floor.
7:52 He had said, I am independent. You're not going to set the end for me. That's for me alone, politically, sovereignly, to decide. You're here as an advisor to advise me on means. The end belongs to me. Little reminder. There. So, after this reminder about what is specific to philosophy as a domain — questioning values, not to repeat, ends — which has meaning only in relation to an intention. It doesn't matter for now whether this intention is supposed to be natural, a need, thirst, or supposed to be cultural, help yourself first, or polygamy here, monogamy there.
8:30 But anyway, I mean, everything that relates to an interest — the word value has no meaning unless we remember precisely that behind it there is a purpose, an interest, including value in the most economic sense possible. That said, I made a small remark last time, since it was a bit toward the end, I wonder if it was well received, but it's going to be decisive for what follows, because I'd like us to finish this great arc of philosophy, of knowledge, that we've been pursuing — and this is the third time we've talked about it.
Empiricism, rationalism, determinism 9:10 And let me remind you of the progression. To the question what can I know, we first saw the answer of empiricism. Let me remind you that with these words I'm not designating specific philosophies, as one might think of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, especially the Anglo-Saxons in the empiricist tradition — not only them. Aristotle too. And you all know the famous painting by Raphael, supposed to represent Plato's Academy — there's a reproduction at the Sainte-Geneviève library — where we see Plato and his pupil, thirty years younger, who spent a long time at Plato's school; Plato and Aristotle are walking down the steps of the Academy, and Plato with his index finger still pointing to the sky, and Aristotle, hand pointing down, empiricist, let's stay close to things.
9:56 So first, the empiricist answer, which is a bit the most immediate one — the answer to what can I know that everyone in general gives first — on the contrary, what is certain is what I have before my eyes. Then, I'll go quickly, the totally antithetical answer, the rationalist answer: we don't talk about things, we don't talk about facts, but about statements, as mathematicians do — we talk first about definitions, axioms, postulates, and then see everything that doesn't contradict them — quite the opposite. We saw that with the first, we had access to reality but without being able to state the slightest truth about that reality — to sum up — with the second, rationalism, we finally have a truth: if A equals B, B equals A.
10:33 Flawless. A real truth, that's not opinion. But without ever knowing whether it corresponds to a reality. Look, I just gave an example of equality, A equals B, B equals A. Leibniz, who as you know is an immense philosopher, but was also one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, at the cutting edge of his era, since he opened up infinitesimal calculus along with his colleague Newton — a little priority dispute, basically they found it around the same time, except that Leibniz's formulation is the one that has remained in use in schools, it's delta y over delta x, roughly.
11:11 So Leibniz, regarding equality, used to walk some of his students through a park and say to them, find me two leaves in the park that are identical. Equality is an abstraction produced by the human mind, it's powerful, it's a sovereignty. It's not of an empirical order. Equality, truly arithmetical. And let me make another small aside here on this little problem posed by the notion of identity and equality.
11:42 Even a coin fresh out of the mint, just struck, with no dust on it, etc., you might think it resembles another coin of the same value like two drops of water, as they say, even more so. No, because you know very well there will always be a few hundred million molecules more or less in one than in the other, of copper or brass, I don't know, whatever alloys go into it. And even, and here's where Leibniz comes in, it's very strong — if they were perfectly identical, with the same number of molecules, Leibniz says that the fact that they occupy two different positions in space means that they must, as he puts it very well, be distinguished by more than solo numero, as he says in Latin, more than by their mere numerical position.
12:29 There. So, closing this parenthesis, once we've summed up the empiricist answer this way — we have the real, but not the true — the rationalist answer — we have the true, without ever knowing whether it relates to the real — the determinist answer, where we appropriate the real for the benefit of the true, where we decide that facts are linked together in reality in the same way statements are in mathematical discourse.
13:05 Theorems, for example, that is, linked together in a necessary and not contingent manner, and according to a certain order, the order of reasons, to speak like Descartes. I even quoted you that famous passage from the Discourse on Method where Descartes sums up his approach in these few lines. Those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers customarily use to reach their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to — well, the mathematical expression, but he uses the expression long chain of reasons.
Descartes' optimism and the "long chains of reasons" 13:39 See the chains. It really has to be that if one link falls, everything collapses. There's a necessity to each statement. Necessity here being of course non-contradiction. So, these long chains had given me occasion to imagine — and here we leave the mathematical domain — to imagine, that is, to formulate a hypothesis that would need verifying, that — this is Descartes speaking, he even writes — all the things that can fall within human knowledge — well, look, we're broadening the debate, the existence of God, the difference between cardboard and gold, love, all the things that can fall within human knowledge — follow one another in the same way as the propositions of Euclid, and that, provided only that one refrains from accepting as true anything that is not, and always keeps the necessary order, there can be — this is less affirmative — none so distant that one cannot eventually reach them, nor so hidden that one cannot discover them.
Two seventeenth centuries: Corneille and Racine, Descartes and Pascal 14:46 And there's this kind of optimism about knowledge that's typical of a man — you'll tell me, of the seventeenth century, but I prefer to say he's perhaps the last great representative of the Renaissance, with that hope of knowing everything that the Renaissance had. Because there's a little wave of pessimism that comes back after Descartes, in the second half of the seventeenth century, with Pascal — small parenthesis, among French speakers, there are educated and cultured people, but there are really two seventeenth centuries, it's complicated to analyze this century — there's a first one, Louis XIII roughly, if you want a rough periodization, Louis XIII, where political power is extremely unstable, the Fronde, the League, Louis XIV forced to flee at age twelve with the queen mother because Paris is rioting, anyway — and so the period of Louis XIII, very turbulent, and it's a bit of a pseudo-historical law, in literature you have Corneille at that time, in thought you have Descartes, the connection has been made, it's obvious, they're two men of the sword, two musketeers, it's the era when honor is still something, until Richelieu bans duels, and then it's over, he castrated it—
15:58 I'm deliberately playing on the expression, because the sword is a bit of a phallic symbol, isn't it, that nobility whose function was above all — people did say nobility of the sword as opposed to nobility of the robe, the kind that had bought its office thanks to Monsieur Paulet. Do you know Monsieur Paulet? Ah, you know Monsieur Paulet, if you read Michel Clouscard, the greatest thinker of our time even though he died some years ago, you'll see the importance he gives to Monsieur Paulet, P-A-U-L-E-T, from the era of Henri IV roughly, because he's the one who created the famous Edict of the Paulette — that's why you should remember his name — the one who instituted what's called the venality of offices, whereby with a certain sum of money I, not noble by birth, could acquire a title of nobility. The nobles didn't need to be told twice — the provincial nobles, having ruined themselves in wars, would do everything to marry off their daughter to a rich bourgeois, which was called at the time regilding the coat of arms.
16:52 You see that women were at the center of rather interesting class and economic exchanges. Well, so this edict is very important, ontologically, philosophically, because before, you had to be born noble to be noble — since I'm talking about ontology, sorry — you had to be born noble to be noble, whereas now I can become one, I can be a commoner and become noble; there's now a continuum between things that were previously separated by real ontological divisions, like the mortal and the immortal, like the base and the noble.
17:22 There. So, this first half of the seventeenth century, unstable political power, so the warrior figure occupies — I'm thinking of Corneille's Le Cid — the one who defends the kingdom against the Moors, who must defend his honor on the level of the restricted community, the family, avenging his father, and the national community against the Moors, and who sacrifices his passion, everything personal, his love, Chimène, to his honor — he's a man of his time.
17:54 Whereas a generation later, with Racine, you have heroes who aren't different — they're exactly the opposite — who trample underfoot everything that constitutes their honor as sovereign, as prince, for the first skirt that comes along. Pyrrhus in Andromache, right? The Greeks send him an embassy to get rid of the little boy, Hector's son, because you never know, through him the Trojan race could come back — they already had a hard time getting rid of them — and he, he's part of the Greek camp, he should comply, but since he's fallen in love with his captive, the mother, the widow of Hector, he's become, objectively, a collaborator, as they would have said at the time.
18:43 And he even proposes to his captive, doesn't he, to switch sides, to join her, to fight the Greeks, to fight his own camp. Should they, crossing the seas again — speaking of the Greeks — he says to Andromache, should they, crossing the seas again, demand your son with a thousand ships, though it cost all the blood Helen made flow, I do not hesitate, I fly to his rescue, I will defend his life at the cost of my own days. Yes, he's still a hero — but amid these perils I run through to please you, will you refuse me a less severe look?
19:15 That's quite the opposite of Corneille, where there's sacrifice. Well, what happened in between? Power became stabilized. Once you have Louis XIV, the longest reign in the history of France. The longest, the most stable. The political problem is settled. I am the State. So, I expand the château, you can listen to Molière, listen to Lully, watch Racine. You will not wage war behind my back in the provinces. That's absolute monarchy, quite simply.
19:46 As it happens, literature didn't take long to react. Immediately you get an internalizing of problems. I had started from Descartes — don't think I'm losing my thread. The shift from Corneille to Racine is the same as the shift from Descartes to Pascal. Descartes has an optimism about knowledge. In that sense, he's one of the last men of the Renaissance. Let me pick up my thread. Whereas Pascal begins to be anguished. He's not at all a man against knowledge.
20:18 That's not the issue. The other question — he's one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. It's not just an important... he even developed, he's not just a mathematician, even a technologist, we'd say today, since he developed the first calculating machine, even with the little gears of the time — not a simple thing. And above all, his famous Pascal's triangle, which will put Newton on the track of infinitesimals. But there's a pessimism about knowledge in Pascal. That's not what brings salvation.
20:48 It's faith, it's charity. There's a very beautiful text by Pascal, if you want to do justice to this unclassifiable thinker. Nietzsche, who wasn't very fond of Christians, said of one of the greatest Christian thinkers, in Pascal's parentage, he flows in my blood. That's homage, quite rare indeed. If you want to do justice to Pascal, there's an admirable text in the Pensées called the three orders. Let me sum it up very quickly. Another tripartition — there's nothing else in philosophy, in systems. Of three orders, there's the order of bodies.
21:21 There, Messrs. Galileo, Descartes, Newton are competent. The order of bodies. Roughly, it's geometry, the order of bodies, in his time. Infinitely beyond that — meaning there's no continuous passage — the order of minds. Then he shows that, while distinguishing them, one can be first in the order of bodies and be a nobody in the realm of minds. And then there's a third order, which he calls the order of charity.
Why it works: nature subject to the laws of language? 21:54 We're no longer in the cognitive domain. And the third, the order of charity, is infinitely beyond the order of minds, in the same proportion, says Pascal, as the order of minds is infinitely beyond the order of bodies. There, that's something that is not — where we step outside the ideal of progressivism, if I may say so, and Renaissance progressive humanism, of which Descartes is the last heir. Only, here, let me repeat this text very quickly, it's a long sentence: those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers customarily use to reach their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to imagine that all the things that fall within human knowledge follow one another in the same way, and that, provided only that one refrains from accepting as true anything that is not, and always keeps the necessary order, there can be none so distant that one cannot eventually reach them, nor so hidden that one cannot discover them.
22:49 There, in short, it's a matter of time — with time, there's no assignable limit to knowledge. That defines exactly the position of dogmatism in philosophy. Not in the pejorative, common sense — not the narrow-minded guy with blinders. Dogmatism in the precise sense that there's no assignable limit to the principle of knowledge I've found. In Descartes's case, the cogito. And I had made this small remark which I said I feared had gone unnoticed.
23:21 It's that, there we go, we've solved our problem of knowledge. Now that we have determinism, we have both truth, the linking of ideas in the theoretical order, and the linking of things, of facts. Someone like Spinoza says that the order and connection of ideas is the same as that of things — the famous theory of parallelism, where we find again our idea of determinism. Except, I had pointed out to you that what's not normal is that it works. That's what should have struck us as philosophers. How is it exactly that, from a scientific point of view, the linking of phenomena occurs in the same order as the linking of concepts in logic and mathematics?
24:01 I had formulated this hypothesis — that's where I've gotten to, and I'd like to pick up the thread from there today, after this long preamble. If it works, that would mean that nature is subject to the laws of language. As you don't see it, as one doesn't see it, allow me to say. Because, well, take even the most applied sciences, complex ones, I don't know — even leaving aside the human sciences, lots of quotation marks, precisely because their scientific status isn't obvious — but take biology, one of the most complex of the so-called hard sciences, whose object is objects of extreme complexity.
24:41 Medicine is not a science, you know very well it's an art, a technique — it's the same word in Greek, techné — it's a technique, meaning its primary aim is not knowledge but relief and cure. It's practical from the outset, medicine, not theoretical. On the other hand, I say this to clarify things, to put things in place a bit — on the other hand, medicine has only become effective in its aim of wanting to relieve suffering, even cure it, since it has relied on, made a detour through, a biology which itself has no practical aim, it's a science — you can be a monster and be an excellent, great biologist, and do research to destroy people rather than save them; biology and medicine have nothing to do with each other in that respect.
25:25 Except that medicine has become effective since it takes this detour, like all the other applied sciences, which could not become effective, could not produce a technology, a technique and then a technology properly speaking, an application reinforcing man's power, to speak like Descartes, to be master and possessor of nature, except through this detour. So biology relies on what? On physics and chemistry — that's what he's saying here. To the point that Claude Bernard, one of the founders of the discipline, said: the living being is the dead thing.
25:57 Physics and chemistry have mathematics as their foundation. I'm not joking. If that's what governs things — mathematics is not at all founded on the observation of nature, but on non-contradiction. Non-contradiction is not a law that governs the planets. It's a law that governs those who speak. Because for there to be contradiction, there must first be diction. I say nothing when I say 'bic.' I speak, but for the moment, to say nothing.
26:30 If I say 'the bic is a mammal,' then I have spoken. And people will tell me 'that's false, that's true.' I have set up a relation, I have related concepts. I have expressed something. Mathematics does only that, it's a science of relation, broadly speaking. Those familiar with set-theoretic language know well that the symbol R, A, R, B is fundamental. Whether that relation be equality, parallelism, orthogonality, greater-than or less-than, whether it be symmetric or antisymmetric, that's another matter.
27:02 But it's the relation each time, not the terms themselves. That's why in mathematics the terms are easily replaced by abstractions, by letters, by algorithms. So there is nonetheless an enigma here. And you understand why certain metaphysicians of the seventeenth century — the height of what is called classical thought, even classical metaphysics, a movement initiated by Descartes and culminating with titans as different as Spinoza and Leibniz, but who all have in common being metaphysicians.
27:39 These are people who breathe God — not religious people. But nearly all of philosophy still testifies to the existence of God at this point. Except you get opposite results. In Spinoza there is one great single substance — I won't dwell on it, it's not my subject today — God, of whom we know only two attributes, extension and thought, following Descartes. Whereas in Leibniz, on the contrary, there is a myriad of substances. Each of us is a monad, as he says. Let's say one is a great sphere, Spinoza, the other is millions of bubbles.
Max Planck and the grid naturalism, supernaturalism, anthropology 28:12 There you have it. This age of classical metaphysics precisely felt the problem less than we do, because it still breathed God at that time. So it was God who had created the world in such a way that it accorded with our predictability. It's wonderful. We can predict eclipses because God made nature remain subject to invariable, unchanging laws — whereas in the twentieth century, someone as little suspect of allegiance to outdated theories as Max Planck, who is nonetheless the initiator of quantum theory.
28:47 Quanta — I'm not even talking about relativity, that's the next step. You see, I say this to sound more up to date. Max Planck, in a magnificent text of reflection — not physics, I wouldn't understand anything of that — but a reflection on his practice as a physicist, asks the question: what is a physical law? And he answers: a physical law is roughly a constant relation between two variables — a perfectly correct answer.
29:17 And immediately, having defined it, he moves to the next line and asks a question: do physical laws exist? Not 'what is a physical law?' — that's the question of essence, esse in Latin. But not the 'is' of existence, the attributive 'is.' A small parenthesis — the verb 'to be,' careful, sometimes it signifies existence: 'God is' means 'God exists' when I say that. But if I say 'God is eternal,' the 'is' does not at all have the meaning of 'exists.'
29:50 That doesn't mean 'God exists eternally,' it means the attribute of eternity belongs to the subject God. And here what is called the logical copula, which allows a predicate to be attributed to a subject, is something quite different. I give these clarifications because it's what allowed Kant to play gamekeeper and come point out those who were poaching a little in the domain of knowledge. So at that time, the question of how it is that it works was posed less, because there was an answer that lay in the order of things, either in the order of nature or in the order of God, which amounts to the same thing.
30:30 We always find a bit of the three-part scheme I suggested to you for when you're floundering a little in a philosophical problem. I recommend these three approaches, this grid that sums up the whole range of viewpoints one can have on a subject. The grid, right: either a naturalist viewpoint — that's the thesis — or, antithesis, a supernaturalist, generally religious, viewpoint, and finally, synthesis, an anthropological viewpoint. In the first case, it's nature that makes man.
31:02 'Ah, that's his grandmother all over, look, I recognize her eyes' — well, genetics. It's nature that makes man, nature in the sense of origin, birth, natus, natal. Or, antithesis, it's a supernature that makes man — man couldn't have appeared just like that, through a purely mechanical process, so God is brought in, either as in the biblical account, or, in a much more modern way, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. You've all seen this film, or heard of it — Kubrick, right?
31:33 Do you remember the most famous sequences, when our ancestors — half-ape, half-man, I speak from a distance, I'm no specialist — we witness the creation of the tool, remember, when with the bone, like that, he realizes he's holding a formidable tool, with which he's going to start a massacre, by the way — yes, but meanwhile the monolith, I don't know, the monolith came from other galaxies, you see, we come back to the biblical side of America — even a guy like Kubrick, who isn't some Midwestern idiot, there are very interesting people in America, the rest — I'm not saying this isn't true — there's also a lot of Tea Party in there, that's convulsed, people who on Sundays preach against homosexuality — and Kubrick himself shows this side, which isn't a flaw at all, it's remarkable in the film from an aesthetic point of view, that a somewhat supernatural decree is needed for this passage from animal to man to occur, it's not a continuous evolution, it's sanctioned — and by the way, you saw the monolith, it has a bit of a 'tablets of the law' look to it, and even though I'm no expert in film history, but if I were, if I had film buffs here, I would ask, isn't there…
Hume against Newton: Kant's problem 32:43 …an effect of intertextuality with Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments — you see, Moses, the tablets of the law on Sinai — they don't have the same shape in Kubrick, there you go, so that was no accident, because today we're going to work a lot with Kant, since we have to wait until the end of the eighteenth century, the reckoning of the Enlightenment's work, when religion took a real hit, in its positive form, for the question I'm trying to raise — which I'd love to become one of yours too — to start being asked: how is it that it works?
33:17 It's as if I were in a cave, I was king, I live in a cave, my minister of war comes into the cave and tells me, 'Your Majesty, your kingdom is under attack,' and I say, 'Place my armies as on the chessboard I'm currently playing on,' and I win the battle without having gone out, without having looked, without having gathered any intelligence, without anything empirical — you see what I'm doing? How does that work? Well, that's exactly what happens in science. So I come back to Max Planck — how does he answer the question of whether physical laws exist?
33:49 And he answers right away: nothing forbids us from thinking that one fine day nature might decide to legislate differently — for example that falling bodies obey one-half g t cubed rather than one-half g t squared — never observed, but I mean, given the way we have acquired our knowledge, nothing rules it out. And here, a good scientist, moreover a good positivist by training, Max Planck — as much an immense physicist as he is a philosopher of science — rediscovers the critique made by Hume, David Hume, no doubt the subtlest of the English philosophers, and Hume is the one of whom Kant says: he woke me from my dogmatic slumber.
34:36 There are two things that put Kant on edge: Rousseau and Hume — you could hardly find two more opposed, but that's what makes Kant so rich. So as for Hume, who holds one of the best-supported skeptical viewpoints in the history of thought, since officially Hume concludes in skepticism — precisely that these laws are in our heads, not in being. Hume said: I play billiards, I see my ball moving toward the target ball, and in my mind I anticipate the movement of the target ball when mine strikes it.
35:09 I ask: what does this term 'law' presuppose, namely that the impact will occur, will transmit? Hume grounds it in habit — it's because I am used to seeing that happen that I turn it into a law. Now that's a serious claim. It means the principle is no longer objective, no longer in the order of things, of nature and being, but in my head — habit is subjective. And just as science has progressed by removing these false certainties born of habit, which make everyone believe that all bodies have weight, whereas people with a bit of scientific education know very well that it's actually quite rare for things to have weight.
35:51 They all have mass, bodies do, yes, but it only takes a little jump 80 km above the Earth and the weight has already disappeared. The mass is still there. But it floats, if I release it up there a little. There you go. But since we're not used to living in weightlessness, we're used to living near centers of gravity and gravitational forces to which we're subject, right, we act as if it were universal. There. So Hume takes up a bit of this critique of false certainties and warns us — and that's roughly what Max Planck picks up again in the twentieth century.
36:32 What he'd like to say, you see, is that we've gone from one extreme to the other — between those who say this regularity of law, of scientific law, lies in the order of God, Deus sive Natura, to speak like Spinoza, God or nature, you see, nature as creation — or, on the contrary, it's something contingent, something only in my head, a habit. The same kind of habit that makes one say all English people are redheads because the first woman I saw when disembarking at Dover was a redhead, to exaggerate a bit.
37:08 That's induction, not, mathematicians would say, deduction. So what does that mean? It means that what has been triumphing since the beginning of the scientific revolution, from Galileo and Descartes up to its peak at the time we're speaking of — the Newtonian system — which was going to remain in force, remain the absolute reference until the theory of relativity, and which, I remind you, must be repeated, still remains valid for most of the technical feats to which…
37:46 how can I put it? …the technical applications that contemporary physics leads to, insofar as it's only when we approach the speed of light or the infinitely small that Newton's laws begin to give way to another form of legislation stemming from both relativity and quantum theory. But it's not to talk physics that I'm saying this. It's to understand why the question arose at that moment and why it's still being asked today.
38:23 Put yourself in Kant's place at the end of the eighteenth century. He says, on one hand, I have Newton — that's… since man has existed, we have never seen such a power of human thought in the cognitive domain. So I take Newton here as a metonymy, to sum up, let's say, the scientific level humanity had reached at that point. At its peak. Newton, Leibniz, etc. — Lueil-Garne [sic]. A tiny sentence of nothing at all, three lines. I appropriate the whole set of the universe's motions, even in galaxies no one will ever reach.
38:59 Bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. Full stop. Universal gravitation. Fantastic. Just think of the power of the human mind. So, it works, then. They're the ones who found the laws. And then, on the other hand, you have Hume who says, yes, it works, but sheer luck. For now it works. Good for it. But there's nothing guaranteeing it. It works, in fact — all right, I'm generalizing — but it isn't proven in principle.
39:30 That's what's troubling. Kant says Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber. It works in fact, it doesn't work in principle. We've seen things like that before — things believed to be immutable laws that turned out to be special cases or even outright figments of the imagination. So Hume's caution remains ever relevant. Simply — and this is what I want to stress — for now, all the experiments we can carry out in the hard sciences, including the theoretical models that make these experiments possible and extend them, confirm the stage we're currently at, which is determinism.
Defining and determining; from the ontological to the relational 40:21 But if we continue the progress of determinism which began in mathematics, we need to dwell a bit on the term 'to determine,' because usually it's used for external, real determination. Are we determined or are we free, or things like that? But we mustn't forget that defining a concept — defining the circle at the start of a geometry treatise — is itself introducing a determination. I remind you that 'define' and 'determine' both contain 'terminate' and 'finish.'
40:56 The prefix is the same. What is defined is finite, what is determined is terminated. We know everything there is to know about the thing. There's no remainder. It's clear, in the Cartesian sense, clear and distinct ideas. It's not somewhere in between. That's what emerges from notions like concept, from reaching the concept through definition. I had reminded you that the very emergence of philosophy at its origin, with the Socratic question around the fifth-fourth century BC, is no accident — it follows the appearance of Euclidean mathematics.
41:34 There had to first be a de facto knowledge for someone like Socrates to begin asking the question of a knowledge by right. You see already — it's no longer a matter of whether truth is possible. You've already found proof of that. The mathematicians showed that true statements can be made. So I come back to Kant. I say, on one side I have Hume, who is right by principle, and then Newton nonetheless. And Kant senses well that there's something more objective in Newton's laws than Hume's 'mere habit.'
42:11 But at the same time, the fact that they're observable in practice, while we can't ground them by right, poses the problem of their ontological validity, to use a somewhat technical term. I remind you that 'ontological' derives from 'on,' the Greek infinitive for 'to be,' and that whenever we move from attributes to the subject or the substance, we're in the category of being. Well, that concerns more the metaphysical, theological domain.
42:44 Although, when we make proofs of the existence of God, for instance, we are in the ontological domain. We're not concerned with the essence of God — whether his definition includes eternity, plurality, goodness or indifference — no, there we're speaking of his existence. That's what the term ontology emphasizes. I say it's a bit archaic, but still, I'm struck, in the dominant ideology — but I prefer to say the dominant images, because 'dominant ideology' is a bit vague, whereas the concept is precise.
43:22 But the return of ontological problems that scientific progress seemed to have consigned to the scrap heap — let me clarify my thought, because I sound a bit allusive. When I distinguish yellow from green, this thing is yellow, this thing is green, I distinguish two adjectives, if I remember my primary school grammar. I mean I distinguish qualities. And of course, as soon as we speak of things in terms of quality, we're already not far from ontology.
43:54 You see what I mean? It's as if there were a being of green and a being of yellow. Whereas physics knows very well — moreover, since Newton, who worked a great deal on light, as you know — that in fact it's exactly the same entity, light, which, according to a difference that is not qualitative but quantitative, namely frequency, produces now green, now blue, now red. What we believed to be an outright ontological difference — I take the example of light, and this holds for all of science's progress.
44:27 What we believed to be properly ontological turns out to be relational. Earlier we saw that weight isn't a property belonging to the being of a thing. We have the impression that weight is the soul of this book. Not at all — it's a relation. It's a relation between this book's mass and the center of the Earth. That's what weight is. That's all. Remove the Earth, remove the weight. So it seems that scientific progress means moving from the constant to the variable, from the particular to the general.
Quality of life, unemployment, and ontological conflicts 45:07 And here I insist strongly on this critique of quality. That it comes back to us — it first came through ecology. You're going to say again that I'm the most anti-eco person in Europe, but what can I do, it's how it is. As early as the late 1950s a concept was going to appear which nowadays is all the rage, of course, but back then it was still timid, and it very quickly became — it's the concept of 'quality of life.' You've been steeped in it, it seems an obvious notion to you. I saw it come.
45:38 All right? Do you earn half the minimum welfare benefit indefinitely, on a fixed-term contract, or do you earn ten million dollars for a quarter-hour of work per year by sitting on a board of directors? — you earn… never mind, what matters is the quality of life, they'll tell you. That's a clever little trick, isn't it.
46:08 Oh yes. Because from that point on, unemployment gets turned into a quality — a quality in the logical sense, of course. Thus it's the enemy. It's extraordinary. Unemployment has become the enemy of capitalism and of employers. Apparently that's good news — if they too want to fight unemployment, they're welcome. But they say, unemployment is the priority of priorities, so we must do as the Germans did — lower wages by 20%, and then, well, we'll see about it.
46:38 You see? Do you think unemployment is a quality? I'm being a bit of a quantity myself here, raising important matters. I was on ontology and I haven't finished — which isn't a digression at all. On the contrary, I'm only illustrating my point about ontology. More seriously than what I just said, the struggles — I was on the subject of ecology there, right? — the conflicts. When I see conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis, speaking as the media do, I'm not sure there really are conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis.
47:14 Between Shiites and Sunnis, when I see conflicts between Corsicans and the French, between Bretons and the French, between the 'Bonnets Rouges' and Breton collaborators, between men and women, between the young and the old, between people in their forties, right? I've seen that too — the forty-somethings are supposedly stealing jobs from young people coming out of university. As Clouscard used to say, capitalism will wage civil war among the poor. By dint of digressing like this.
47:44 I note that most of the time, these are ontological oppositions. That's what scares me when I say it's coming back. Class belonging is not an ontological notion, the way being a man, a woman, black, white, Muslim or Christian is. You belong to the proletariat, and it's not true to say that Arabs are poorly regarded in France. That's not true. If your name is King of Morocco and you're an emir, you're very well received at the Georges V.
48:15 Do you agree? None of that is a matter of qualities. It depends on quantity. We mustn't say so. Otherwise — remember the Paulette edict, there's a continuity in what I'm saying, I'm trying to show it. We need to recall Monsieur Paulet. There was a terrible danger with him: that it could spread, good grief — that one could become noble. There could be newcomers to the club. That's troublesome, you understand? If we start saying that it's a purely quantitative element that grants access to what up to then was called in Rome the boni homines — bad Latinists translate that as 'good men.'
48:53 No, that's a mistranslation. It means the landowners in Naples, etc. — look at Campania — it means people of standing, people who have property. Up to that point, the qualitative and the quantitative were merged. Whoever had the money, had the power, had the woman, had everything. That's the archaic world, in principle, by right. In fact it still exists when you look around — but it was merged. Still, you know, I've had a long career in Africa, I mean, there were quite a few countries where a husband's weight, his bodily heft, counted for a lot, because in societies where famine, or at least malnutrition, is recurrent, where the threat of famine hasn't disappeared, it's clear that someone with weight has a reassuring, comforting side — the criteria of beauty and attractiveness aren't quite the same there.
49:51 So, you see, I'm worried about this return of the ontological clash of qualities against one another, because these things cause millions of deaths, if you look closely, like everything of the order of the imaginary when it takes itself for the real. Swift, the one who wrote the adventures of Gulliver, had already rightly mocked the war that had broken out. Do you remember what the cause of the war among the Lilliputians was? I don't forget the war, it's interesting given the time we live in. You know my seminar was about between crisis and war. At the outset, there were those who said you should break eggs at the small end and others who said you should break eggs at the big end.
50:29 That had caused a war. It's a bit ironic, pre-Voltairean. You know that the whole eighteenth-century French tradition draws on such inquiries in order to mock how much suffering and misfortune wars cause, often starting from whims that seem completely irrational, like that. Now, differences of quality had still been taken up. That's what interests me. Because when you start reasoning by, for another example, the law of blood, the law of the soil — there's nothing more qualitative than the law of blood.
51:05 I have quite a few German friends who explained to me that even if they decide to naturalize as Argentine citizens, they cannot lose German nationality. It's not permitted under German law to give up German nationality. That's extraordinary all the same. It's a metaphysical system. There, I'll close this little parenthesis on my worries. Still, it's a bit of a didactic side, it's a guard raised against this return of ontologies.
Ecology, Aristotle's finalism, and mechanism 51:38 Because it inevitably means regressions. There, I'm making a value judgment, but a well-founded one. These are regressions because it's the old superstitious mode of thought. If you look closely. When people say, for example, that we absolutely must come to the rescue of endangered animal species — I'm not a blinkered anti-ecologist, I'm the first to be disappointed to find myself in a forest where I'm told there's no wild animal likely to cross the road. I'm the first to find it marvelous to glimpse what Rimbaud calls, in an admirable text, the ancient wildness.
52:13 And of course, even if I don't see any, knowing that there are some in this forest, in these woods, and that one might cross my path, adds an implicit interest. It's an impersonal thing. I don't know if it's the only one. As for the forest, that's not the question. But from there, must every species in nature be preserved? Which has never happened — nature itself takes great care not to preserve natural species. It wiped out the dinosaurs without a second thought.
52:44 So, we're not quite sure whether it's a matter of meteorites or other hypotheses, pasture lands that were poisoned, or rather, grazing, or the volcanoes of Siberia that could have caused cooling. In any case, nature — there were no humans at the time. You can't say it's man's fault that the dinosaurs disappeared. There you go, nature is merciless toward nature. It's a logical problem I once put to an ecologist. He was telling me, he wanted to make me understand that man introduces no new ontology, that man is part of nature, that everything is natural.
53:18 In that case, no worry at all. You can't hold anything against him, it's nature against nature. As Hegel said, try to put two thoughts together in him, there isn't even one. To think, there must be at least a coherence, a unified thought. Even just remembering on a Tuesday what was said the previous Monday. There you go. In any case, these qualities are what collapses with the passage from the world of opinion to the world of science, to the world of the scientific revolution.
53:55 If I take here — I'm talking about the law of falling, I'll take just this one example, the fall of bodies. There. So, the Aristotelian model: the body here, there is somewhere inside the body a force that pulls it downward, because for Aristotle, this is very serious, there is a down and an up. And we know full well that we allow people in New Zealand to put up a sign saying 'this is up' if they feel like it.
54:29 whereas for us, they are down below. Well, that's the era — up and down. And moreover, these forces, he calls them inclination — you see the anthropomorphic side — inclination, impetus, up to, I think I mentioned it to you, up to this metaphor he uses, he was a very keen observer. He had noticed that bodies accelerate as they fall, and to explain this acceleration he said, since every motion — this is Aristotle speaking — consists for a body in rejoining its natural place, thus heavy bodies, grave bodies, their natural place is down below.
55:10 So, grave bodies fall because they are going to rejoin their home, their sweet home, their natural place where motion stops, which is down below. Conversely, smoke, which belongs to light bodies — and this especially is aberrant in today's physics — smoke falls like a stone in Newton's tube, as you know, it's because it's lighter than air that it seems to rise upward, that's Archimedes. But just as horses, when they approach the stable, speed up because they smell the oats from afar, bodies, as they get closer to the ground, said Aristotle, accelerate their fall.
55:45 You see the naively anthropomorphic side there is to this physical conception. Coming from a philosopher who is anything but naive — well, this isn't his field. There you go. But what's important is that the principle is here, inside. You see? And so, here, it's the finalist point of view. The primary explanation of motion is the fall. Whereas, mechanism — these are the classic oppositions, mechanism versus finalism — with Galileo, for example, if there's motion, it happens outside bodies.
56:19 You see? It's not going to start from inside here. It's from outside. There is motion communicated to another body, and the notion of impact becomes crucial. There must be contact for there to be motion. There's no magic. There's no spontaneous generation of motion. And it's precisely because impact — material contact — is a decisive notion that we have the notion of mechanism. That's exactly it. 'Give me thought and extension,' said Descartes, 'and I'll build you whatever you want.'
56:54 So, there you go, body 1 communicates. Notice here that in finalism, we reason in terms of substance, but here, in terms of relation. It's always the same opposition. And finally, here, insofar as we appeal to an end — and the end, mysteriously concentrated here, any end requires an underlying subject — to put it very simply, though it needs digging into further, it presupposes not merely something, but someone.
57:29 This book pursues no end. Its author, in writing it, yes; the object 'book,' no. The table pursues no end. The very nature of inertia is to desire nothing, to never be beyond itself. To project oneself forward is already to be more than a mere thing. So, here, it's inertia. That is to say, there can be no motion coming from within things themselves. Motion can only be brought in from outside.
58:00 that is to say, from there comes the word 'determination.' For those who studied Latin, the 'de' is the 'de' meaning 'from,' that is, limited, finite, terminated, coming from, from another cause, external to it. Comparing these two schemas shows you, quite freely, how enormous the historical trauma was that the passage from the old consciousness represented.
58:30 That lasted thousands of years. And it continues, more or less spontaneously, to this day. Sometimes I see a car and, from its shape, I get the impression it's smiling or scowling. You see, we're made that way, marked by childhood. In childhood, we bump into things. 'Mommy, hit it, it was mean, the table.' It's not just us who try to personify things, we're also contributed to by it. So it takes a great deal of time to break free a little, to emancipate ourselves from this tendency to turn every object into a subject, every something into a someone.
"Know thyself": the problem of identity 59:08 And so, we're at that point with this business of determinism. I come back to Kant, who is quite perplexed. Because first of all, he is a philosopher. So here I'll sum everything up now, because this will matter today. As a philosopher, the problem of knowledge is not the first question, still less the last. Because otherwise, let me remind you, philosophy would belong at the CNRS. It's not only knowledge, or rather it is a very specific form of knowledge that is not on the CNRS's agenda — the one inscribed on the pediment of the temple at Delphi, the one Socrates refers to.
59:46 Know thyself. That doesn't mean one shouldn't take an interest in the laws of astronomy. Well, actually it does — that's not what we're talking about. It's philosophy we're talking about. So there, it's something else. It's what one is in oneself. And in this phrase, many see, of course, a diversion of attention drawn from the outside toward a turning inward. That's fine.
1:00:16 But the most important word is 'same.' Because if the self, the 'I' of each one of us, were not capable of a certain identity, a certain invariance — call it what you like — it's this invariant aspect that must be known. Know what in you remains identical. Know yourself as the same. As selfhood, if you want to show off and speak Latin — ipse. As sameness, that's what it means.
1:00:51 I say this because it's not obvious. We are all examples of people for whom someone's identity seemed obvious: 'I recognize him. It's him.' It depends on the circumstances. There's the physical criterion. But that's what changes the most. Neither you nor I are the same height now as when we were four years old. So it's not on that criterion that we're going to base the identity and invariance of each of us. There isn't a single cell in our body that isn't undergoing transformation at every instant while I speak.
1:01:21 And there are billions upon billions of these cells. Well, tens of billions. So it's not in this kind of perpetual flux that we're going to look for the permanence of our identity. So, you'll say, well yes, I see where you're taking us — it's inward, toward character. Not that either. We all have examples of people who were charming, had a gentle character, and then they went off to war and came back either traumatized or completely altered.
1:01:54 Sometimes it comes from elsewhere. It was a revelation, transforming, completely changing one's character. And I come back to the body, don't I, to say: well yes, I know Pagani, he has two arms, two legs — I could come back from the war minus two arms and two legs. I hope you'd keep talking to me as if I were still me. It's hard to pin down identity. Pascal had thought about this. When he says we love this person — he's alluding to love here — we love this person, we find her graceful, but smallpox will have ravaged her face and we will no longer love her.
The preface to Phèdre and the ideology of scarcity 1:02:27 So we say we used to love this person. We must therefore conclude that we love only qualities and not subjects. You see, Pascal had seen this very closely. So, this crisis that thought undergoes — it's no accident that it happens toward the end of the eighteenth century, at the moment when the biggest cracks appear that accompany the birth of the world we live in today, the modern world. The main cracks being the industrial revolution in England and the political revolution in France.
1:03:03 In a nutshell — I won't even go into every transformation this induced, transformations in culture, the emergence of Romanticism — modernity has nothing more to do with the world before, where there was a place for each thing and each thing had its place. I found in Racine's preface to Phèdre an example, because we don't sufficiently gauge — especially since the ideology of our time tends to blur this — we don't sufficiently gauge how much history separates us. We think we're on equal footing with Rabelais, Rousseau, etc., but in fact the changes wrought by history itself...
1:03:34 One example: in the preface Racine wrote for Phèdre, he justifies having slightly altered the historical-legendary — rather legendary — account according to which it was Phèdre herself who slandered her stepson to her husband, her royal husband. 'He tried to attack me, he must be eliminated, he must be punished' — a double crime, since it's the wife of the king he attacked, and moreover one who could be his mother — yes, it's appalling, slander.
1:04:04 And Racine, who puts the slander in the mouth of Phèdre's servant, not in Phèdre's own mouth, justifies this change as follows: 'I thought that slander was unworthy of the mouth of a princess and that it was more fitting in that of a servant.' Full stop. I am not criticizing — Racine is an immense poet, and this takes nothing away from his genius — this sort of social blindness by which, for him, it's normal that base sentiments belong to the lower classes. Full stop, that's all. And that a princess, by nature, by birth, cannot slander.
1:04:35 That's the ontology I'm criticizing. I have nothing against princesses, but against aristocrats — except when they start passing themselves off as ontology. And the little allusion I made earlier — I wonder whether ecology isn't a survival of this form of aristocracy, namely: there won't be enough for everyone. Perhaps because I've lived in some of the poorest countries in the world, I'm sensitive to this, because over there it's a very widespread idea, considered normal.
1:05:06 In scarcity, there's always the anxiety that there won't be enough for everyone. I ran a music training center, thanks to your taxes — I thank you — because it was funded by the European Union, dare I say it. And I managed to extract quite a bit of budget. In Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, right next to Mali. And I was very pleased that two of our orchestras were selected to go to MASA. That may mean nothing to you, but it was a triumph for the musicians. MASA is the African performing arts market held in Abidjan, and it's as important for professionals in the field, for music groups and so on, as the Cannes Film Festival is for filmmakers.
1:05:43 So off they went. I learned upon their return that those who hadn't been selected had gone to see a marabout so that the plane would crash — so that the plane carrying their selected colleagues to Abidjan would have an accident. I'm not criticizing them. I'm not saying they're barbarians, savages. Not at all. I understand very well. In such scarcity, it's unbearable that he was chosen and not me. There isn't enough for everyone. Well, I won't dwell on it. I'll leave the developing countries, the LDCs, the least developed countries.
1:06:18 I'll leave that behind to come to our own world. What I find odious is that people want this ideology to dominate here too now. 'You're filthy consumers.' You hear it every day on TV: 'Our resources are limited, there isn't enough for everyone.' We've been chewing on that for... What does MEDEF [the French employers' federation] deplore? Wage increases, purchasing power, and hence consumption. What do certain degrowth ecologists deplore? Consumption. It's a strange convergence, isn't it.
1:06:52 There you go. That's why I dwell a bit on this point. I've already told you, don't take this as a provocation but as one of my most sincere thoughts: I'm one of those who think I don't consume enough. I won't speak for others. I belong to one of the richest countries in the world. I'm not among the poorest classes of this country — nor, for that matter, among the richest. But still, I find that I don't consume enough. That's my right. And I come back to my business about quality. Without leaving what I was just talking about, you'll see — I mentioned overproduction earlier.
1:07:24 It's the same thing. You have the impression we're dealing with economic categories. Overproduction — that's measurable, for heaven's sake. I challenge you to measure an overproduction. At what point do you decide we're producing too many cars, or too much electricity, or too much milk? 'Too much' and 'not enough' are not scientific terms. That's what I'm saying. More and less, yes; too much and not enough, no — there we shift into quality. You see the difference? That presupposes a purpose.
1:07:56 If, for example, I produce far too much relative to the purchasing power of the market I had anticipated, then it becomes objective. There's overproduction relative to the 25% profit margin I wanted to achieve within two years. But that's not what's said. We say 'we're experiencing overproduction.' We don't say 'we're overproducing relative to the margin I want to make.' Which leads to what happened in the crisis of 1929, as that historian put it: the absurd spectacle of crowds starving in front of overflowing granaries.
1:08:28 You know, when they poured milk down the gutters to bring prices down, or threw coffee into locomotive furnaces, and so on. So there you go, I've gone on a bit long, but we're in the concrete stuff of philosophy, I mean, questioning the terms that seem most obvious in everyday language, so worn out that they no longer seem to pose a problem — and those are precisely the most problematic ones, like 'overproduction' or 'overconsumption.' I'm also struck that when you see a news report on shoppers in a supermarket on television, they say 'consumers, for their part, think...' as if there were a humanity of consumers.
1:09:05 As for me, I look in the store: there's a guy coming from the factory, another coming from the office, a third coming from his research lab, a fourth who's unemployed. These people are producers — by what right are they only consumers? In each of us there's a moment of consumption and a moment of production, it doesn't work like that. What's true is that some produce more than they consume and others consume more than they produce. But that's the problem with social class, we'll see that later. So, I come back to my story about Kant, quite embarrassed by Newton on one side.
Rousseau against the right of the strongest 1:09:40 He faces two novelties. There's Hume's critique, which says: for now, things are going well, physics, science is developing, progressing, it's not stalled, and yet the foundations are uncertain. So, once again, Kant tries to find a justification for science that is more objective than what Hume says, without at the same time making it a matter of eternal laws. And on the other side, there's a second novelty of Kant's time, but this one not at all in the purely theoretical domain, rather in the practical and even political domain: Rousseau.
1:10:11 We cannot understand the step we're going to take today in the philosophy of knowledge if we don't understand that there were these two revelations, independent of one another. Hume, on one side, Hume's skepticism, which shows him that physical law is not legally grounded, there is no demonstrated natural necessity, there are only habits that we mistake for laws. And then there's Rousseau. So, what does he bring in, him?
1:10:42 Up to now, we've been, look, in the fall. In the law — I seemed to be joking, but I'm quite serious. Physical law, the law of the fall of bodies, has played the role of model in the history of physical laws — hence the theory of grave bodies, as it was called, the law of gravity — and even now, research on gravity, believe me, is at the cutting edge of physics research. In particular, for those who are toiling away, they may perhaps manage, it's not my field, I won't decide, to determine particles of gravity.
1:11:18 We've already found the name — they're called gravitons. Just as Einstein had well demonstrated particles of light, that is, photons. And here, no, here it's the fall. I come back — we're dealing with Newton, that's when today, that's when we talk about the fall. With Rousseau, it's the opposite movement. You guess I'm talking about freedom. Which goes from bottom to top. It's not me making this parallel, it's Hegel who pointed it out very well. He says freedom moves exactly opposite to the order of physical bodies. In history.
1:11:48 The whole movement of man is an ascensional movement, like that: the transition to the bipedal stance, houses being built, palaces, technology, the conquest of space, and deserts. It goes in the opposite direction from falling. It's a rising, yes, it's an ascent. So, I go back to this story of Rousseau, of freedom, and what does Rousseau bring? Something as shattering as Hume, but in the opposite domain. Namely that Rousseau, for the first time, produces a political theory in which he doesn't say it's not good that there are rich and poor, that it's not good that there are the powerful and the weak.
1:12:25 He doesn't say that. He's not doing what-ought-to-be. No whining. He studies what's happening, what is, and he says that it can't work on the principle of force. If it were based on the principle of force, we would never have arrived at the real societies we are in. That's not my subject today, I'm not going to... But I still remind you of the basic elements. I remind you that the first pages, there are a few dozen of them, of the Social Contract, the whole beginning, is a critique of the concept of the right of the strongest. It's no coincidence that Rousseau begins there.
1:12:57 Because otherwise, politics would have started from the natural sciences if it depended on force. The first notion you learned in physics is that of force. I'd even say that the notion of force and everything that derives from it is rich—force, then work, power, energy. Force, everything that derives from force even defines the natural field.
1:13:27 The Earth orbits the Sun because its mass is lower. And likewise for the Moon around the Earth. It's not a choice. Now, you know, it's repeated endlessly, the fashionable theory in Rousseau's time was that of Hobbes, homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man, it's force that reigns among men, and fortunately there were political laws to limit the damage and create the State. I'm simplifying Hobbes a bit, but roughly, that's it.
1:13:58 A regulating State that prevents too many wolves from devouring too many sheep, that tries to establish a balance. Fine. But still, it's force that is the principle of human relations. Now, Rousseau, with that famous passage: the strongest is never strong enough to always be the master unless he converts his force into right and obedience into duty. Because that's where you see him philosophizing, he reacts to the words. We say 'obey force,' no, says Rousseau, that's a nonsense.
1:14:30 We don't obey force, we submit to it. What do you want to do about it? That's not respect, that's not obedience. As soon as my master's force diminishes, I turn on him. That's not a stable political world—one where what makes the ruler valid is force. That means as soon as I stage a coup, I have legitimacy. So there could be palace revolutions every week, couldn't there? That's not what can found a stable historical and political world.
The third letter to Malesherbes: servitude and domination 1:15:00 So, human societies were built otherwise. And that's the hypothesis of the contract, of course, which is not merely a program and the problematic in Rousseau. I insist a lot on this. He doesn't say that men should make a contract to escape the flaws of a bad society. We are, for Rousseau, in a pact, a connivance since always as human beings. And it's rather the social violence we suffer that is a break with this pact and with our origins.
1:15:31 What he sums up, long before Marx spoke of class struggle, and a generation and a half before Hegel—before Hegel speaks of the master-slave relation as the decisive core of the human sciences—Rousseau speaks of servitude and domination. When force reigns, there can only be servitude and domination. And I say this because he is often taken for a sociophobe.
1:16:04 If I had to invent a barbarism, for someone who has a hatred of society, a love of solitude—that would be a magisterial misreading. There's a very precise passage in one of the four admirable letters he sent to Malesherbes. Malesherbes was a nice guy who belonged to what we'd call today the aristocratic and cultivated Enlightenment establishment. And who somewhat tried to reconcile Rousseau with the Encyclopedists and the other Enlightenment figures.
1:16:41 And he said, Rousseau, would you explain—we don't understand what you find, walking or wandering in the forest, when we're comfortable here, there's a fireplace, beautiful music, carpets. And Rousseau, to answer him, recounts one of his days at the hermitage, in the third letter to Malesherbes. So it's in the imperfect tense, since that's meant to express repeated habits. 'And every morning I got up with faithful Achates'—that's the dog's name, it was Aeneas's dog in Virgil's Aeneid—'hurrying my pace for fear that someone would seize hold of me before I could slip away.'
1:17:22 The language of the paranoid. 'My first wish was that neither letter nor visit should come to disturb the charm'—any contact with others—but this seems to confirm the thesis that he's a sociophobe. I don't want mail, I don't want help, I want to leave all alone. Let's continue this reading. 'Hurrying my pace for fear that someone would come and seize hold of me before I could slip away. But once I had managed to get past a certain corner, with what a thrill of joy I said to myself, here I am, master of myself for the rest of this day.'
1:17:59 'I then walked at a more tranquil pace'—the musician, he knows how to change tempo within a sentence, you see, suddenly it slows down—'I then walked at a more tranquil pace, seeking in the forest some wild spots,' with a very beautiful crescendo. You might say, Pagani is talking nonsense. Rousseau is clearly happy when he's in the forest, and the further he gets from society, the happier he is, as they'd say back home, the more he's into it, as you'd say. No—he has this extraordinary sentence: 'seeking some wild and deserted spots where nothing showed the hand of man'—but the sentence isn't finished, and if I stopped there, it would prove the others right.
1:18:33 'Where nothing showed the hand of man, [comma] announced'—with a circumflex accent—'servitude and domination.' There, the two words appear. It's not society that Rousseau flees, it's this society built on servitude and domination. So it's not about regressing to the stage of frogs taking refuge from the city, in nature. It's that nature, at this point, which we'd better call the landscape, since so much human work has gone into it, to make the grove—sorry, the bocage, Poitevin or Norman, it doesn't matter—it takes millennia of effort on marshes and terrain.
Man makes man: heteronomy and autonomy 1:19:12 So, 'where nothing showed the hand of man, [comma] announced servitude and domination.' So it's the society of fact and not the society of right that Rousseau rejects at this point. Now, all this work is in Kant's spirit, because what is most striking for Kant about Rousseau is the audacity—I speak of the French as audacious in the political domain—the audacity of having, for the first time, founded the political body neither on God nor on nature, but on man.
1:19:47 Before, it was God who gave the laws at Sinai, or in all religions there are myths that tell very well how the principle of legislation was transmitted by a divine legislator—Hammurabi, the Code of Hammurabi, you see it clearly at the Louvre on the stele where you see the god handing to the Babylonian sovereign—yes, Mesopotamian—the first written law known to humanity. So the fact that Rousseau says it's not God who makes man, it's not nature that makes man, it's neither the natural nor the supernatural, it's man who makes man.
1:20:28 That is to say, man is not a given, it's not of the order of being, man is only what he does—if he does nothing, there's nothing, there's an animal, there's what he had at the start. So man becomes a bit like wealth, according to the Edict of the Paulette—well, I'm getting ahead of myself today—know that it's not enough to be born a man in order to be a man. A famous passage from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says—if the embryo, this was well before, two centuries before the debates on abortion, whether at five months the fetus is already a human being, is a serious inquiry.
1:21:08 The theologians deserve credit for raising the problem of the age of reason. Is it seven years old, is it eight years old that we reach the age of reason—it's not obvious, all these things. At least they deserve credit for raising problems. As Rimbaud said, theology is serious. He adds, hell is indeed below and heaven is indeed above. And this is a great first, because until then, all justifications belonged to the order of the given. Alright, let me sum up now. What is common to the thesis and the antithesis which seem to oppose each other completely?
1:21:41 Rousseau sends them both back to back because he spotted what they have in common. It's that it's given. Man has the choice between a nature to which he must submit or a god whose commandments he must conform to. In both cases, he is—and it's Kant who will use this somewhat more technical word than Rousseau does—heteronomous. He sought the law, nomos, outside himself, heteronomous. There is no autonomy. What Rousseau will bring to modern political thought is autonomy. The antechamber of freedom.
1:22:11 'The impulse of mere appetite is slavery,' we read in the Social Contract. 'The impulse of mere appetite'—appetite is a term that at the time meant instinct in general, not just the appetite for food. 'The impulse of mere appetite is slavery, obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.' 'The impulse of mere appetite is slavery, obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.' Only, in the phrase 'obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself,' underline for me twelve times, please, at minimum, the 'one has'—that's where Rousseau's strength lies, the law that one has prescribed for oneself, not that has been prescribed to me, not one I've been forced into.
1:22:52 By saying 'worship me because I am the most beautiful and the strongest and the richest.' No. The law in which I participated as legislator and not only as one legislated over. That extends the discussion of law. Fine. But there, we're in the domain of action, of practical philosophy, whereas we were in the philosophy of knowledge. So, why do I bring in Rousseau, with whom—or rather, who set me a problem of knowledge? Because the two complement each other. What Kant will do, first of all, is precisely to emancipate the subject of knowledge.
From mirror to prism: the active subject in Kant 1:23:27 For the common point... Ah yes, I turned the page. May I? So, the common point between the theological viewpoint and the naturalist viewpoint—we're going to see this clearly here. It's the passivity of the subject. Let me explain. We'll also find again the opposition to the analysis in empiricism. Let's say, if I remove this, here I put pre-critical thought, the pre-critical viewpoint.
1:23:58 I say this because Kantian thought—a bit to sum up Hegel's too—we say dialectics for Hegel, Kant is critique. If you want to sum up Kant, this word is criticism. That's the Kantian viewpoint. Pre-critical, then, both Cartesianism and the empiricists, you have... I'll put Kant here, sorry. The way he represents the subject, the self, the construction of the subject. You see, let's say this is a mirror and there, you have a flower in front.
1:24:30 That's empiricism, isn't it? There's a flower. I see a flower because there was contact. Remember the diagram from earlier. Applied to psychology, to vision, etc. From the clash of atoms. It was great progress for the time because there is contact between an external reality and my retina. And... now, if this is the object and this is the subject, you'll notice that the subject here is passive.
1:25:02 Whether it's nature—what I just showed as an example—or God putting into my head what's called, in classical metaphysics of the time, innate ideas, those born with me because God put them there. Like the idea of a perfect being. You know this story about the perfect being? You know it's somewhat familiar. Descartes's demonstration of God's existence. Can you sum up the ontological proof for us? Sorry, no, I already introduced it. It's one of Descartes's proofs of this kind, but the one he relies on most to prove God's existence.
1:25:35 The so-called ontological proof. Let's go. God is perfect, existence is included in the perfection that God is. Yes, very quickly put—some intermediate steps are missing but that's it. That's it. What state were people in? Indeed, such a difficult problem resolved so simply. Yes, Descartes says every thing has necessary attributes and others that are contingent. For example, a triangle—being right-angled is not something necessary.
1:26:05 There can be a triangle that is not right-angled. I don't know, any triangle. A dog can be neither white nor black. Color is not part of what is substantial and essential in a dog. It's not like being a predator, being a carrion-eating animal, etc., like Milou, which is Uranus. So I cannot conceive of a triangle without attaching these necessary attributes to it.
1:26:37 Polygonality. I cannot think a triangle without thinking several sides. Three. I cannot think the circle without the equality of its radii. All that is what is necessary. In the same way, a perfect being exists necessarily by definition. Because a perfect being is one that lacks nothing. If it lacked existence, it would lack the essential. So a perfect being exists necessarily. It's the only concept, says Descartes, the concept of a perfect being, that includes existence in its essence.
1:27:12 Sorry. Because the definition of 'sheep' will never give you the number of sheep there are on Earth. It's interesting that essence and existence are disjoined. The definition of a thing doesn't give you the number of instances of that thing in reality. Except for one exception, the notion of a perfect being. There. That's not the subject—it's the delights of classical metaphysics which I'll set aside. We'll have occasion to return to it, in fact. But what interests me rather is the passivity of the subject here. Whether it's empiricism, naturalism, or theology, each time the subject—in this case, man—receives impressions here.
1:27:50 I keep this optical metaphor, which I didn't choose by chance, to show what the subject becomes in Kant. The object is always there. I put here. There, I put a flower. I put whatever. Precisely because in Kant, we never know what the thing-in-itself is. There is something. We can't define it with any concept. An external reality. And the subject, that's what it is in Kant. It's a prism—I draw badly.
1:28:21 That's a mirror. That's a prism. It's an optical metaphor. That is, the big difference is that there, something happens. Here, nothing happens. That's passivity. A good mirror is one that distorts as little as possible what reaches it. And reproduces mechanically and faithfully, like a reflection, what's in front of it. Which can at best only repeat. If you don't want to state a rigorous inequality like mathematicians, you'd say that the mirror can contain at most as much reality as the model, but never more.
1:28:55 There can't be more reality in the mirror than there was in front of it. Which led classical scholasticism to say, 'there is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses.' There is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses. That's where you see that the return to Aristotelian empiricism is fundamental in medieval scholasticism. And in terms of my image, that means there can be nothing in a mirror if there isn't first something in front of the mirror.
1:29:26 It seems so simple that one wonders why I insist. Except that here, in Kant, the subject is no longer this passivity. Another metaphor, the tabula rasa—we speak of cards, the blank slate—like the virgin wax that Aristotle speaks of, the mind as a virgin wax in which reality comes to imprint its seal. That's how I get the notion of planet, of star, of mammals. Here, it's a prism. That means that what enters here and what comes out as colored light is completely different. There's transformation here.
Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: a priori and pure reason 1:29:59 The subject becomes a little factory. That smells of Rousseau. That smells of the French Revolution. The emancipation of the subject, the subject who works. You think I'm exaggerating? We'll read Kant. I think I already mentioned it, but everyone knows a bit the anecdote of Kant's little walk. You know, he's a little eighteenth-century pietist German. A few little German habits. I'm not mocking him. I have immense respect. That's not the point. Maybe he seems a bit ridiculous to us, as always when we look at it from outside our own culture, but he was very orderly, meticulous, with strings hanging from the ceiling where he'd hung handkerchiefs, because you shouldn't waste time looking for your handkerchief in your pockets.
1:30:37 So he paid, and then afterward, we play. Then on his walk, accurate to within a meter, with about-turns, he came back very regularly for years and years. Twice he exceeded the limit. The day after the storming of the Bastille, to be the first to get the news from the gazettes, and the second time to get the first copy of Rousseau's Social Contract translated. I'm going to read Kant, who does a bit of a summing-up. That's why it's rare for me to read you a text.
1:31:08 I'm going to read it to you because it sums up all the sessions on the philosophy of knowledge we've had, since it summarizes them. You'll find this in the preface—it's his best-known work—the Critique of Pure Reason. It's Kant's big theoretical work. They're all theoretical works in the Kantian sense, meaning the cognitive aim is primary, not just the moral one. And here, there are two prefaces, aren't there? And I'm talking about the preface to the first edition, where there's this famous passage.
1:31:49 'Insofar as there is to be reason in the sciences, something must be known in them a priori.' A priori—I'm not giving a course in the history of philosophy and not systematically initiating you into Kantian thought, that would take much longer. You need to know that a priori is a key term in Kantian thought. A priori is opposed to empirical. It's very simple once you know it. When it's done honestly, you understand nothing without the definitions; once you know them, it's simple. A priori is opposed to empirical. Either I know something without going through experience, like if A equals B, B equals A.
1:32:19 I don't need my eyes, my ears to know that. I have to be careful about what I'm saying. It's on the inside. It has nothing to do with looking outward. So, a priori knowledge, a strict synonym in Kant, equivalent: pure. Critique of Pure Reason means examination, critique of everything reason can know without recourse to experience. Critique of pure reason, where there is only reason. Like pure water, there's only water, no lemon juice.
1:32:49 So pure reason is reason that doesn't yet let experience in. It's not that Kant is opposed to it. He says you must first know, take stock of everything you can know on your own beforehand. Besides, you'll see his sentence makes a little parallel with quite current economics. So, 'insofar as there is to be reason in the sciences'—otherwise they're not sciences, that's what he can say—'something must be known in them a priori, and the cognition of reason can relate to its object in two ways: either merely to determine the object and its concept, or also to make it real.' Either to determine it, to know it.
1:33:25 That's theoretical philosophy, you guess. Or to make it real, that's practical philosophy. Practical in the Kantian sense—it has nothing to do with practical in the sense of superstores, supermarkets, new practical. Nothing to do with that. Practical in the moral sense, meaning the aim is to change a reality and not leave it as it is, which is by contrast what theoretical use requires. So one is the theoretical knowledge and the other the practical knowledge of reason. It's necessary that the pure part—that is, the part we've been able to develop without yet borrowing, you'll see why I take this financial metaphor—the part that can be developed without yet borrowing from outside—it's necessary that the pure part of each, however extensive or restricted its content may be, namely that in which reason determines its object entirely a priori, be exhibited first by itself alone and without any admixture of what comes from other sources.
1:34:21 For, you'll see, 'it is bad economy to spend blindly all these incomings without being able to distinguish later, when revenues come to fall short, which part of these revenues can bear the expense and on which part it must be restricted.' Extraordinary economic metaphor. I offer it to you, Tristan, because we'll need to use it somewhere. It's no coincidence that he's a sort of ancestor of Mrs. Merkel. I'm not trying to condemn Kant, it's something else all the same.
1:34:52 But still, we clearly see this little meticulous, accountant-like side. If you think of Holbein's beautiful painting showing the moneychanger. I don't know if you've seen this painting where you see the moneychanger with his wife in the 15th century counting the day's gains and losses in the evening. You see this pride, this bourgeoisie. There's good reason to be proud. The greatest tribute ever written to the bourgeoisie is Marx's Communist Manifesto. The first fifteen pages are a great tribute to the bourgeoisie. It liquidated feudalism, the family, religion—do as much yourselves.
1:35:23 Pay attention. This is not the bourgeois Monsieur Prud'homme's point of view on the world, but Marx's. So mathematics and physics are the two theoretical branches of knowledge of reason that must determine their object a priori. The first, mathematics, in an entirely pure way, of course there's no lab and no experiment. The second, at least in part, physics. A theoretical physics, as we still say now, isn't a bit complicated. It calls upon experience.
Mathematics and physics: the revolution of Thales and Galileo 1:35:53 Or rather, as we shall see, upon experimentation. Which is already more active than experience. The second, at least in part, but then taking into account other sources of knowledge than those of reason. Mathematics, I'll read it without commenting too much because it lets us summarize what we've seen, and I'll summarize things that, roughly speaking, you know: mathematics, since the most remote times to which the history of human reason extends, entered among the admirable Greek people onto the sure path of a science. But we must not believe that it was any easier for it than for logic, where reason has to deal only with itself, to find this royal road, or rather to trace it out for itself.
1:36:29 I believe rather that, mainly among the Egyptians—that is, before it became, with Euclid, a theoretical corpus—among the Egyptians it long remained groping about, and that this definitive change, which made it a science in the sense we understand it today, must be attributed to a revolution—the term is underlined—brought about by the happy idea of a man, of a team, in an attempt from which the path to be followed could no longer remain hidden, and by which the sure scientific path was opened and laid out for all time and to infinite distances. We're no longer in the Enlightenment century, this tone.
1:37:00 The history of this revolution in method, which was more important than the discovery of the route around the famous cape, and that of the fortunate mortal who accomplished it, have not come down to us. However, the tradition reported to us by Diogenes Laërtius—someone who compiled ancient opinions of philosophers, somewhat haphazardly—who names the supposed inventor of even the smallest elements of geometric demonstrations, of those that, by general agreement, never need demonstration, proves that the memory of the revolution brought about by the first step taken on this newly discovered path must have seemed extraordinarily important to mathematicians and has thereby become unforgettable.
1:37:37 The first who demonstrated the isosceles triangle, whether he was called Thales or whatever one likes, had a revelation, for he found—listen carefully to what he says, and note the passive side that he's criticizing—that he must not follow step by step what he saw in the figure, nor cling to the mere concept of that figure. I have an isosceles triangle, meaning two equal sides—I have a concept here, but no representation; here, a representation. This figure, but that he had to realize, and he adds in parentheses, or construct—you see there's an active side there—or construct this figure by means of what he thought of it and represented to himself a priori.
1:38:19 And that in order to know anything for certain a priori, he must attribute to the thing nothing but what followed necessarily from what he himself had put into it in accordance with his concept. I'll move a bit quickly because I'm now getting to the dense passage I want to dwell on a bit more. When Galileo made his spheres roll down an inclined plane—he's going to take three examples. Sorry. When Galileo made his spheres roll down an inclined plane, yes, with a degree of acceleration due to gravity determined according to his own will. When Torricelli made the air support a weight which he had himself beforehand determined to be equal to that of a known column of water, or when later Stahl the chemist changed metals into calx and calx back into metal by removing something and putting it back in.
1:39:04 And there's the upshot. It was a blinding light for all physicists. They understood—a sentence that sums up Kantianism on its own—that reason only sees what it itself produces. All at once, it's no longer a contemplation, a vision, a theoria. Theorein, the Greek word, comes from an old root that means 'to see.' It's the final stage when one leaves the cave in Plato. It's rough going, you scrape your knees—Plato is profound, a great political thinker, a great tragic one too.
Platonic theoria: the good, the sun, and nourishment 1:39:36 He knows that on arriving at truth, one loses a few feathers along the way. But still, one gets the reward when one finally has the vision of truth, of the absolute, which is illuminated by the sun—which decides, a metaphor, an offspring, as he says, ironically, in the Republic. When his interlocutor tells him one day, 'You will tell us about the father'—sacrilege, I cannot. Another time, 'You will pay us back the story of the father.' So when one finally arrives, there's nothing left to do but contemplate. And even more passively, like the infant—what does the infant do? What does it have to do?
1:40:07 An infant. Yes, yes, that's it. Feed, absorb. Why am I joking about this? Read carefully one of the most profound passages in the whole history of philosophy and in all of Plato: it's the end of the sixth book of the Republic. Just before—the beginning of the seventh, which sets out the famous myth of the cave, which everyone is supposed to know—but go back to just before; the myth of the cave doesn't come out of nowhere. In the sixth book, Plato speaks precisely about the good.
1:40:40 We come back to values. Let's seek the good—that's been going on since the start of this dialogue. Whereas at the beginning, the question was: what is the best political regime for the city? They quickly realized that answering this required an immense detour through fundamental things, in particular through the study of what the good is. Everyone wants the good. I'm summarizing what comes before, it's not our topic today. Now Plato, who is often summed up by the theory of Forms/Ideas—there is somewhere, in an intelligible world inaccessible to our senses and eternal according to Plato...
1:41:12 The Idea of felt, say, in which all the empirical felts we touch and sell and buy participate—there you go. An Idea for everything, even for hair, mud, and dirt, as is said in the Parmenides, and not only for virtue and beauty. And then there's the Platonic theory, apparently textbook, classic, right: there's an infinity of beautiful objects, but there's a single Idea of beauty in the intelligible world, etc. So there is a participation called vertical—I'll go quickly because it's fairly simple—between the real world and the world of Ideas, vertical because one rises, which links the multiple of...
1:41:54 which is why such-and-such an actress judged beautiful, such a beautiful sunset, such a beautiful house, such a beautiful piece of music, such an elegant piece of reasoning—we also say a piece of reasoning is elegant—all of that participates in the Idea of beauty which, somewhere... Well. That's vertical participation. But there's also a horizontal participation, more mysterious, in Plato. That is, that the Idea of glasses is related to all the glasses that exist empirically—we can still manage to conceive of that, even if we don't see where the world Plato speaks of is located.
1:42:27 Well, that's logical, at least. On the other hand, that there be a relation between the Idea of glasses and the Idea of a microphone, I mean... Now, in Plato, there is an Idea that runs through all the Ideas and comes to crown them, so to speak. There are... there are two levels of transcendence in Plato. I'll go fast, but I want to stay clear on points that will be useful to us. There's the classic level, I repeat, the intelligible world in relation to the sensible world. That's the Plato one learns at school.
1:42:57 First level of transcendence. The circle that mathematicians speak of exists nowhere—from the empirical point of view, of course. It's a statement. It's a set of words. And in empirical reality, one can see things that resemble it or evoke it, like ripples in water, for example, or the orbits of planets. When you look closely, they're not really circular but rather elliptical. There you go. So, on the other hand, there is a second level of transcendence. Above the Ideas, let's not forget to say, there is the Idea of the Good, which comes to crown everything else in Plato.
1:43:31 All the Ideas participate in the Idea of the Good. Including that of hair, mud, and dirt. Of course, it's the interlocutor who says, 'That's extraordinary, this story of yours—what is this Good?' He says, 'I cannot speak of it because it is beyond discourse, but I will try to speak of its offspring in the sensible world.' Its offspring, its copy, its avatar, as we'd say today. That's not to say there's the sun to give you an idea. And he says, what's the connection? It's that the sun, you'll notice, says Plato, gives the eye the power to see and gives the object the power to be seen.
1:44:07 Even though the sun itself is neither something that sees nor something that is seen. It is the third term that allows the subject to see and the object to be seen. He says, that's what the Good is, but for the soul. The Good is what allows the soul to know and the object to be knowable. So he says, but why are you talking to us about the sun? Tell us about the Good directly. That's when he says—I alluded to it earlier—he says, I cannot, flatly.
1:44:37 For that would be a sacrilege, it is beyond being. Being—that's the Greek eidos, idea. The three words essence, idea, form are the same word among the Greeks. It's translation problems, it's silly. In Aristotle, the term eidos is translated as 'form'—philosophy of form; in Plato, as 'idea.' And afterward, they're set in opposition. It's the translators' opposition, not the authors'. There you go. You still find a bit of this visual sense of 'idea' as form in 'anthropoid ape.' It means they have the form, the visual appearance, of man.
1:45:07 Yes, for example. And so in this passage—what is troubling, I'm getting now to my story of the baby, of suckling and nourishment—when he says, 'I will nonetheless tell you about its offspring,' he says, notice that the sun, because here we're in the cognitive order, does not only give the eye the power to see and the object the power to be lit up and thus seen, but it also gives beings growth and nourishment.
1:45:45 He says, that's what the Idea of the Good is. There you go. It's not my topic today, but it's fascinating, it's captivating. He says—yes, it's the end of Book 6 of the Republic. True being gives growth and nourishment. I come back to Kant, given the timing we've set ourselves. So they understood—Galileo, Torricelli, Stahl, two Italians out of the three; the word 'engineer' comes from Italy, engineering.
The judge who interrogates nature; Heisenberg 1:46:15 Originally, it was about siege engines. They understood that reason only sees what it itself produces according to its own plan, and that—you see how this sums up much of our course—it must take the lead with the principles that determine its judgments, according to immutable laws, that it must compel nature to answer its questions and not let itself be led, so to speak, on a leash by it. You see there's a tone of emancipation from the already-given, whether natural or divine.
1:46:45 Not to let itself be led, so to speak, on a leash by it. He's speaking of nature. You see I had some reason to be worried about today's contemporary deification of nature that we are witnessing, because it's a regression compared to the eighteenth century. It's that simple. For otherwise, making our observations at random and without any plan laid out in advance—for those who think it's enough to watch apples fall in order to be Newton. Broadly speaking, some people think that.
1:47:15 Newton was taking a nap one day in the shade of an apple tree, he saw apples fall. Good heavens, that's it, I've got it, that's universal gravitation. Some people have a strange idea of how knowledge is generated in history. And some have an interest in having the history of science told that way. Reason must therefore approach nature. One mustn't be a mere onlooker at the moment of experiment. Reason must therefore approach nature. Look how precise this passage is: holding in one hand those principles which alone can give to concordant phenomena the authority of law, in order to be instructed by it, by experience.
1:47:51 There is no refusal of experience. It is true—but not like a pupil who lets the teacher tell him whatever he pleases, but rather like a judge presiding, who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. Do you see the metaphors at work here? Before, we had a pupil, or those who climbed up ziggurats in antiquity to watch the stars, prostrate before the order of the gods and of things.
1:48:22 It's magnificent. I'm not making an aesthetic criticism here. But what naivety, to believe that by climbing 30 meters up I'll get a better view of the chemical composition of the star. And then one sentence: reason only sees what it itself produces—a synthesis of all the aporias we've had between rationalism and empiricism, when we set them back to back, we see it clearly here. We see it clearly. What matters isn't whether one must start with experience or with reasoning—we've seen that it's when the two work together that there are scientific advances.
1:48:54 But it's the status of the knowing subject that matters, whether it is passive or active. I'd point out to you that one of the main advances in physics—contemporary physics this time, and here I speak under your correction, because as soon as it gets close to today's science one risks talking nonsense if one isn't in the field—there, at the moment quantum theory appeared, which—here I'm not speaking scientifically but like science journalists—reintroduced a bit of the impression of chance into universal determinism. In quantum theory there are the famous relations—well, an application of quantum theory—the uncertainty relations of Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist, which are authoritative: when we use them, what these uncertainty relations say is that one cannot determine simultaneously the position and the velocity of a particle; either one determines its position in spatial coordinates, or one calculates its velocity, but not both. So you'll tell me, well, of course, we can't know everything, there's always...
1:50:04 ...a residue of complexity that will escape the sagacity of the human mind even in millions of years—that is not at all what Heisenberg says. He doesn't say it comes from the complexity of the object. He says it comes from us. There he rediscovers our very act of experimentation transforming the thing we want to know: to determine the position of the electron, I must indeed illuminate it, for example, and in illuminating it I bombard it with a photon travelling at 300,000 km/s, which considerably alters its velocity. How could I possibly determine a velocity that I am in the process of transforming? It's roughly as if I took a lamp and lit everything up in order to see what the objects looked like when I wasn't lighting them—that's contradictory, it's my very act, my very way of wanting to know that produces this other appearance. It doesn't come from the being of things, from their nature—no, it's the self... well, not a self, not a personal, subjective self, otherwise we're back to Hume and habit—no, it comes from our mind being made that way, the human understanding, our mind is made that way, there's a prism there, and the main demonstration lies in the status...
Space and time, a priori forms: the transcendental aesthetic 1:51:15 ...incredibly new that he gives to space and time, which up to then had been the very frameworks of exteriority. All exteriority unfolds along a double axis: that of space, extension—as classical philosophy said, the res extensa in Spinoza, in Descartes, the res, the extended thing, as opposed to the res cogitans, the thinking thing. There are only two substances in Descartes: the thinking substance, the cogito, and the extended substance, space, the world of mechanics, of physics. And now here space and time, which were the frameworks of exteriority—I come back to Kant—he tips them over into the subject. Space wouldn't exist; it is the subject that supplies it. The demonstration, very quickly: when he says that our idea of space cannot come from the perception of space—we haven't experienced space before having been in space, since perceiving a space...
1:52:26 ...is only possible if space is already given, if it is, as Kant says, a priori. No experience would be possible if space were not already given, and a fortiori time. Try listening to a note of music while suppressing time—you can't. You cannot hear it, because in order to hear it, it must resonate, if only for a billionth of a second; it must be in time. You'll find this demonstration in the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, which remains, to this day, the most fascinating part: it's the Transcendental Aesthetic—nothing to do with 'transcendent,' this isn't big words meant to dazzle crowds, as if giving a fakir's lecture, no, no, it's not transcendental meditation, it's very precise in Kant. Before him, 'transcendent' was opposed to what is entirely beyond, like the circle I spoke of earlier, the mathematicians' circle, which is beyond any sensory relation; and its opposite was 'immanent,' what is here and now—this, here, now, what is immanent, what is transcendent. Transcendental is much stronger: it is what, within the here and now, pertains to transcendence, like space.
1:53:36 —precisely, it is there, it is in the book; the glasses occupy a space, but our knowledge of space, and hence its reality, certainly does not come from experience and the external world. That is why Kant says, in his very precise language, that space is the a priori form of experience—yes, is the a priori form of external experience, that is, whenever we try to be receptive to realities outside ourselves, it is space that serves as their a priori framework; for internal perceptions, it is time. And afterward he will show that time is thus a priori for all perceptions whatsoever, since even outer perceptions—you can set this part aside, it gets complicated—but my perception of space passes through interiority, hence through time. In short, by concentrating attention, drawing it ever closer to time, Kant inaugurates the great reflection of the centuries to come, that of Hegel and Marx, on history—I mean, these are important stakes. Whereas classical thought was fascinated by the relation of thought to extension, to space, it is the relation to time that will characterize the anxiety of modern man, the anxiety...
