English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Why aesthetics in philosophy: return to Kant 0:37 Good evening dear friends and dear comrades. You were told there would be a plan for this evening's session, and I say that thanking you for being faithful to these, I think it's session 14, or 13, 14 of our sessions on confinitude.
1:21 And I'm also very happy that we're managing to keep up this weekly rhythm, which is quite tight, and I'm very grateful, and not only for technical reasons, to Philippe, who has other things to do but who does this very well. And I say that because I've seen that in your questions you often say thank you to yourselves, and that pleases me, that collective 'you.' Thanks to the team, thank you for what you do.
1:51 I can see that we're also thanking the team. In the plan, I said it's a plan in two parts, it's a bit simpler. First, I would like to summarize, and to clarify things so we don't get lost — last time it was a bit complex, abstract, especially in the properly philosophical part — so that we don't get lost among the leaves and branches and lose sight of the forest, to use a rather worn-out metaphor.
2:26 And so, to take a bit of a step back. But in the meantime, I've seen many questions, some of which are exceptionally relevant, interesting and profound. And I'm not saying that to lay it on thick, you'll judge for yourselves. Now, I realize that I intended to answer these questions as a preliminary matter, but that won't be added on top of the plan, since, for the most part, the summary I'm about to give first, as planned, will allow us to reach positions from which we can answer these questions more clearly.
3:15 There we go. So, let me remind you, last time, if I set aside the very beautiful text by Hugo, 'Along the Shadows,' which was a leftover from the session before last, we entered somewhat into the heart of the matter, aesthetics as a part of philosophy. And we immediately raised a question.
3:45 It took quite a few detours, quite abstract and taxing gropings, to answer this question. So, why aesthetics? Why, in a series of philosophical discussions, why make room for aesthetics? Is it like inviting a guest, the way one would invite an urban planner to talk about the city? I have no idea, honestly.
4:15 And it took us a while to find the answer. It's that since its founding, philosophy in the strict sense — not the profound ideas one stirs up about existence, about the world, about God, about man. For that, I mean, well before Socrates — I've said it, and I repeat it — the so-called philosophies, the so-called Eastern thought, Hindu, Chinese, are often of a dizzying depth. And I repeat once again that I prefer a profound thought, even a non-philosophical one, religious for instance, to a superficial philosophy.
4:54 So, it's not a value judgment when I say that it's from the Socratic questioning — I'm not the only one to say this, you can well imagine — that philosophy in the strict sense is born, that is, where reflection bears less on things, on the great subjects I just mentioned, than on the words by which we designate them, which are the words of the tribe, and which presuppose that we agree among ourselves before turning outward to see what corresponds to what we have agreed upon.
5:27 Now, from its principle — in the double sense of beginning and permanent motor, of permanent relaunching, principle and origin, principle as one says the combustion engine, and origin, the beginning — Socrates, one must not forget the inscription engraved at the temple of Delphi, which Plato quotes several times, in particular in the Apology of Socrates: 'know thyself.'
5:57 The formula was addressed to someone who came for something other than to know himself, to ask the oracle whether he was right to undertake a distant journey, or to declare war on Sparta, I don't know. You know the oracle cares little about the question it's asked; it generally answers something else entirely, as with poor Oedipus. Oedipus had come to ask questions about his origins, it was troubling him, and there, the oracle tells him, 'You will marry your mother and kill your father.'
6:31 That was not at all the answer to the question that had been asked. Now Socrates, then, reminds us that to each of us the oracle answers, as a preliminary matter so to speak, 'know thyself.' Now, we had to pass through — not Kant's 'aesthetics' as a term, since Kant did not explicitly write an 'Aesthetics,' he wrote the Critique of Judgment, which is of course the first systematic philosophical aesthetics.
7:11 And it's in this Critique of Judgment that, with the introduction in its final distinction of judgment, that of determining judgments and reflective judgments, Kant, through reflective judgment, suddenly reveals to us — and here I come to the essential point, which I'm summarizing, though I'll add a few notions that will help us move forward in the assessment — that when I say 'this is beautiful, this pleases me,'
7:45 and that I feel an aesthetic pleasure, a properly aesthetic one — that is, it's not the pleasure I get from having bought scissors that work well because I was able to cut my nails without slicing my fingers, without hurting my hands and without mangling them, there I'm making a value judgment, these are good scissors, that's a value judgment, but a value judgment I can account for because, unlike judgments of existence — these scissors cost, I'm just making this up, 10 euros — value judgments have no meaning unless they're referred to an end.
8:32 So the Critique of Judgment is an aesthetics coupled with a teleology; teleology is the part of philosophy concerned with reflection on the notion of finality, of ends, telos, the same root found in 'television,' 'telemeter' — it's everything that is far off, the end is what is not here, what is over there. So what Kant taught us, as a considerable advance while also being rather — not mysterious, but rather problematic, we haven't finished with it — is that in reflective judgment, the fact that I make a value judgment as when I say 'here are good scissors,' but the crucial difference is that whereas for the scissors I can spell out the end according to which I judge that these scissors are of good quality, namely cutting well without collateral damage, in the case of the beautiful object, I feel a pleasure,
9:42 but if I'm asked what desire it is actually satisfying, I'm at a loss — it's not only that I don't know which desire is involved, it's that I hadn't even realized that the beautiful object gave me pleasure only insofar as it was satisfying a desire. In the extreme, it's the object that taught me that I had this desire. There is therefore something almost humiliating for the subject that we are, for consciousness, for the subject reduced to consciousness alone, setting aside the unconscious — something humiliating for this subject who wants to be dominant and to govern everything, an all-powerful cogito, to suddenly realize that the object knows more about me than I do myself.
10:34 Here is a desire I wasn't conscious of until then, but it's the fact of feeling a pleasure that reveals to me that I had a desire. A pleasure is a desire in the process of being satisfied. This is the enigma we're going to keep digging into. And so you see the connection with Socrates, with 'know thyself': by reflecting on the object, by questioning it, since it's my only lead, my only link, my only witness for determining the desire which, for now, is at a completely undetermined stage — I only know that I feel one.
Reading of Julien Gracq's Au château d'Argol 11:17 To make this explicit, let me read you, you see, in order to illustrate and to ground the abstractions we've just been stirring up, two literary excerpts. First, an excerpt from a novel by Julien Gracq called 'Au château d'Argol' ('The Castle of Argol'). I'll show you the cover here, I think you can see it — published by Éditions José Corti. Gracq was always faithful to this small publisher, which unfortunately no longer has a storefront facing the Luxembourg Gardens since José Corti died a long time ago.
11:51 So, in 'The Castle of Argol,' which is one of his very first novels, incidentally — I'll spare you the plot — it's a novel that takes place almost entirely in a manor in Brittany belonging to the novel's hero, Albert, a blond man passionate about philosophy, among many other things. Before I read you the passage that will bring us back to reflective judgment, let me read you this, which will surely interest you.
12:21 It's quite rare, you see, Julien Gracq is one of the few literary writers who can integrate philosophy, even in an abstract sense, into a novel without it feeling out of place. 'It was mainly, as we have seen, to philosophical research that his mind had first applied itself. At twenty, setting aside all thought of success or career, he had set himself the task of solving the enigmas of the world of the senses and of thought. He read Kant, Leibniz, Plato, Descartes.'
12:54 'But the natural bent of his tastes pushed him toward more concrete philosophies, some dared to say more courageous ones, which, taking hold of the world bodily, generously, and not content with letting the ray of particular lights penetrate it, as Plato does in each of his dialogues, for instance, demand of the world its truth and its total explanation by dismembering it into its component parts, as Aristotle did, and no longer Plato, as Plotinus did, as Spinoza did.'
13:27 'But above all, he had become passionately curious about the prince of philosophical geniuses, Hegel.' It's rare, a novel — 'this king of architecture and of the science of totalities, the one who dethroned all abstract knowledge from its glory, the one for whom the most brilliant philosophical systems — the most brilliant philosophical systems — are but nebulae from which he composes his gigantic Milky Way.'
13:58 'He had just conceived an energetic predilection for him. He held his Logic to be the lever mockingly demanded by Archimedes, which would lift the world.' And he took Hegel with him to his solitary manor in Brittany. As it was just before vacation — you see, that fits, a reading recommendation — 'to fill overabundantly the days he expected to be dreary and arid in a melancholy region.' Now I come to the passage that brings us back to reflective judgment.
14:29 So let me quickly give you the plot to set the passage in context. In this castle, he has invited a friend — or rather a friend who invites himself — who announces his arrival. He will arrive with a superb woman. So there will be two men and one woman. All of this is quite banal for now. And here we are at the part of the novel where Albert, letting everyone sleep — they arrived the night before — walks in the woods, these forests of rather short trees, since the wind in Brittany prevents trees from reaching phenomenal heights. And he walks along a river and is fascinated by the sky reflected in the river, until he suddenly sees emerging in the reflection his friend Herminien, who had woken up and was also walking, but on the other side, on the opposite bank of the river.
15:13 There we go. That's the context, so that from here on everything is clear. 'He had discovered the real meaning of this inconceivable landscape' — the landscape reflected in the river — 'which he had until then only seen upside down. From the depths of this abyss whose deathly cold bit into his skin rose the trembling, moist face of the sun.' The reflected colonnades of the trees, you know, in the water the trees look like colonnades. 'The reflected colonnades of the trees arranged themselves like heavy towers, smooth and burnished like copper, and from the center of this inverted peristyle of solemn regularity.'
15:52 'The face of the sky came before his eyes and his lips like a merciful abyss, henceforth immediately open, into which man could finally plunge' — you see the temptation to plunge into the water as if plunging into the sky — 'plunge without return and satisfy without restraint what revealed itself at that instant to Albert to be his most natural inclination.' The word is underlined, but it's better not to lean over, otherwise you end up like Narcissus and drown — that's my addition. Good.
16:24 'For a second he closed his eyes under the spell of terror and the intense pleasure of the temptation to plunge, and when he reopened his eyes, the curtain of trees tore apart under the water and the reflected image of Herminien' — so his friend — 'walking effortlessly beneath its surface came toward him through this forever forbidden world, and amid a tumult of dread and ecstasy which in one second sent all his blood rushing back to Albert's heart, one heard the ten strokes of a clock ring out distinctly.'
16:59 A few passages where he describes Herminien, 'bareheaded, his dark curls given over to the wind, he had clasped around his shoulders a long grey coat in whose austere folds he was entirely wrapped.' I remind you that Herminien is walking parallel to him on the opposite bank. It's a small river, not very wide. 'His face bore witness to a fraternal exaltation; it seemed to Albert that this image, risen from the depths of the waters, smiled at him with a smile whose calm and meditative fixity dwelt in a region inaccessible to all human relations.'
17:32 'As if borne by the web of an exalting music,' his limbs — Herminien's limbs — 'seemed prisoners of the fatal laws of a number' — the word is underlined — 'and his majestic gait, beyond all measure and at every moment visibly oriented, seemed to Albert the materialization, for the first time stripped of any veil' — here I pause — the materialization of what? Listen carefully — 'of what Kant called, not without mystery, a purposiveness without representation of an end' — that word is underlined too.
18:09 So here I'm restoring this very famous formula of Kant's: in aesthetics, the sensation that puts us in relation with something beautiful, and aesthetic pleasure, is produced by a purposiveness without representation of an end — exactly like reflective judgment: I know that I feel a desire since I have a pleasure, but I don't know which one; everything happens as if there were a purposiveness without my being able to say, well, the goal is wealth, is health, is holiness — I have no idea, and it doesn't matter. And finally, a second text, much shorter, which I borrow from the preface written by another author for another novel, the most famous work of its author — Oscar Wilde, the English author — 'The Picture of Dorian Gray,' which, as I've already said in a session, has never had much luck at the cinema, because one should
Oscar Wilde: art is both surface and symbol 19:19 make a captivating film out of it, and in fact I've never seen a film adaptation that does justice to this extraordinary book. Let me also recall the plot for those who don't know it: Dorian Gray is a young man of unimaginable beauty — I remind you that Oscar Wilde was homosexual, he was even imprisoned at the time for it, while war criminals walked free and one could get hold of any obscenity one wanted on postcards on the boulevards of London or Paris, for that matter, but one absolutely must not be homosexual, and above all must not be caught in the act — that's the Protestant world, do what you want, but don't get caught. So, a young man of exceptional beauty who, at the start of the novel, is having his portrait painted by a painter who has a fondness for him, and this painter makes a painting so lifelike, so fascinatingly identified with its model, that a
20:30 fantastical dimension begins to enter the story: the painting gradually changes, changes each time he commits a bad act in his life, the painting changes, one sees a sneer appear on the mouth that had until then been angelic and perfect, and so on. In short, time stops for the hero Dorian Gray, who does not age — the old dream, you know, the old dream of eternal youth realized — he doesn't age, but the painting ages in his place. That's the plot, isn't it. Now let me give you the quotation, it's very short, it's in the preface, where there is a bit of an aesthetic manifesto, whose details I'll spare you, but which has the merit of containing this passage, which, if I quote it, will remind you of quite a few things we've seen together about aisthesis, surface, appearance, what the senses show us — we saw, we saw the gulf that exists between the landscape, which is a setting, and nature, isn't that so.
21:40 Nature is the object of physics, landscape is the object of painting, or of poetry, or of feeling, or of the landscape gardener — but here we're dealing with art. Here is the excerpt from this preface: 'All art is at once surface and symbol.' I told you last time that the beautiful object is the one that reflects my desire, that expresses my desire — a collective 'me' too, isn't it, that expresses our desires — so it's the object that is the mirror, isn't it, the surface of the mirror, you remember the little boy in Hegel's text who threw onto the immaculate surface of the water, which he then sullied with ripples, precisely by producing effects. In short, so 'all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.' Here's something that wasn't in Kant, that's why I quote this text, to be able to extend
Nature and freedom: negativity in the history of art 22:51 our reflection afterward, which Kant had the merit of initiating. Kant says there is a desire in the process of being satisfied, and then remember, in his introduction, this crucial distinction he makes between two domains whose legislations are exactly opposite: the domain of legislation by nature, which is a determining and even deterministic mechanism functioning on the mode Y equals F of X — let me specify here, which I didn't do last time, that when I say F of X, it's extremely extensible, it could be a statistical F if we're in quantum mechanics, I'm not entirely stupid, a bit ignorant, but not entirely stupid — and then, in contrast, legislation by freedom. But since I've noticed that listeners always tend to confuse freedom with the good, let me remind you that freedom is the freedom to do good as well as evil, otherwise
24:01 it's not freedom — that's what antiquity lacked, this negativity, this awareness of evil. Look, since we're in aesthetics, let's take advantage of the great divisions of the history of art in Hegel's aesthetics: look at the representation of the god — we've already seen this in previous sessions — the gods in Egyptian statuary: they are colossal, gigantic, overwhelming, hieratic, motionless, they are there for eternity, and they give off a mystery that almost no other art from any other culture has approached in this way, except perhaps sometimes the sculpture of sub-Saharan Africa. After the representation of the gods, I move on to the Greek world — after Egypt, it's a classic progression — the gods are much more on the scale of man properly speaking, the statues are about the size of a man, but it's still an idealized man, there's no negative, you see.
25:11 The Apollo Belvedere or the statue of Jupiter, or of Hermes, is each time an ideal man. And then the third stage is the crucified figure writhing in suffering on his cross. So you see, where Plato places the end of the quest for knowledge — the sun in the myth of the cave — we've seen that it can become, in the expression of Nerval, a black sun, if we put freedom in the place of the good. So Plato says the sun is there to illustrate the idea of the good, or rather to exemplify, to symbolize the idea of the good; if we put freedom in place of the good, there is a possibility that this sun might go out — I'm alluding to Nerval's archi-famous quatrain, isn't it: 'I am the dark one, the widower, the unconsoled, the prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower, my only star is dead, and my star-spangled lute bears the black sun of melancholy' — melancholy,
26:21 the fact being that the root 'melas' means black — melanism, you see, melanoma — the risk is there. So I repeat: 'all art is at once surface and symbol.' You understand better now, after my long detour before: 'those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril' — those too who try to penetrate the symbol, to try to interpret the symbol or to plunge beneath the surface, are taking a risk. And that's the sentence that ends this short excerpt: 'It is the spectator,' that is, you, me, any one of us, 'and not life, that art really mirrors.' Life is mirrored by good journalists, good reporters, who are there to talk about life in the realistic sense, if I may allow myself that redundancy, isn't it — but in art, it's other aspects of life that manifest themselves, since art is about the only thing that evokes, through the symbol, through the symbolic order,
27:31 so I repeat this quotation without interrupting it now: 'All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those too who try to read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.' So, from here, let me read you the questions that were sent to me — here are the three questions I selected following our last session. The first is from Ludovic Godard Cadillac; I'll allow myself to read it in full, I hope I'm not doing him a disservice: 'Hello, I think I'm having difficulty grasping the distinction between analytic judgment and synthetic judgment.' You see, we're reviewing last time's material, and you see you're not the only ones, because he
The straight line, the shortest path: analytic or synthetic judgment? 28:41 says it, with the kindness and honesty to say so — it's people like that who make progress — but I'm sure he's not the only one who doesn't understand this crucial distinction right away. Let me remind you that this is a distinction Kant makes in the Critique of Pure Reason, not in his aesthetics; more important is the distinction between reflective and determining judgments. So I repeat: 'Hello, I think I'm having difficulty grasping the distinction between analytic judgment and synthetic judgment, and this despite the various videos that address this subject.' So here's someone who made the effort, who went back and reviewed the lesson, and for whom there are still some grey areas. 'So here is my question: is the following proposition an analytic or a synthetic judgment? I would like my many interlocutors versed in the hard sciences to pay attention to what follows: is the following proposition an analytic or a synthetic judgment?' Here is the proposition: 'The straight line is the shortest path connecting one point to another' — a great classic of classical geometry, indeed, isn't it. And he answers,
29:52 you see, he finally answers, he sums up the reasoning process he went through in trying to answer this question: 'Off the top of my head, I would have said it was an analytic judgment, since it seems to be a property of the straight line' — so when I have the straight line, I look at its properties, like, I don't know, the triangle has the property that the sum of its angles equals two right angles, well the straight line has the property of being the shortest path from one point to another — 'but a friend pointed out to me that in order to assert such a proposition, namely that it's an analytic proposition, one had to consider the set of all possible paths, and thereby step outside the concept of the straight line.' So let me answer right away, since I'm doing all this in order to answer it, while also returning to the summary of our progress and clarifying it at the same time — it's useful. I'll answer Ludovic here: first, bravo for the question, thank you also
31:04 for having made the effort to give an example, and for having, with great honesty and philosophical courage — it's a great virtue, philosophical courage in matters of knowledge — himself conceded his perplexity, and even given almost the impression of having made a misinterpretation at first glance. And I congratulate, if I may, his friend — he has an excellent friend, he asks excellent questions, he has an excellent friend — who was quite right to draw his attention to the fact that the answer depends on the path taken. And here, so as not to complicate things, I'll give a very simple example: suppose he's with me in a boat, Ludovic, and his friend — I say 'his friend' just to have someone, it could be anyone — is in another boat, but one that is between 15 and 20 km further away, that is, in any case, what matters is that it's beyond the horizon line, so that even in perfectly clear weather
32:14 I can't see it anymore. One might think that the shortest path is to follow the waves and go straight, set course directly for it, not deviate a millimeter to the left or right until reaching it. Well, no—there is an even shorter path, but one that would go underwater, because as you well know, we're not dealing with a plane but a curve. The plane is curved—that's why the horizon limits our view, because after that it tips downward—I'm speaking loosely, there is no down and up in reality—but that's why our boat should go underwater, should be a submarine, and take what's called the chord in geometry, rather than staying on the surface of the earth—well, the surface of the water here, the surface of the ocean, which follows the curvature of the planet and is therefore necessarily longer, so it's not the shortest path to go from boat to boat. So his friend is perfectly right.
33:24 to say that. What does that prove? That Kant is very careful, you see. And perhaps the most important notion his friend suggested to him is to bring out the verb 'to exit'—when we say 'is the shortest path,' we exit the concept of what the concept of a straight line, as such, gives us. And this allows us—not to review, since we hadn't seen it last time—but precisely to approach a crucial distinction that Kant makes. I've told you he's the champion of distinctions, but here it's not a distinction between judgments but between different ways of treating things: mathematical treatment and philosophical treatment. So it's interesting—there have been discussions about what unites and what separates them, ever since Plato said that no one may enter here who is not a geometer, through Descartes, who especially delighted in mathematics because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning—I won't even mention Leibniz, or Spinoza, who was permeated by it—well, it's not exactly all of that in a general way, it being understood
34:35 that there are connections—what distinguishes them to the point that these are two completely different disciplines? Well, Kant proposes this distinction: philosophy proceeds by concept—it's so simple to formulate, take advantage of it, you should write it down—philosophy proceeds by concept, mathematics proceeds by construction of concept. There's a new distinction. So what does 'construction of concept' mean? And Kant answers very clearly—what's good about Kant is that it seems complicated, but he immediately gives the rules for the new words he uses or the new expressions. To construct a concept is to represent it a priori in pure intuition. Let's go back to abstract things—this makes you work, and it's worth the effort we're making here. There are concepts that come from the understanding: this is a piano, this is a tablet, this is a lamp, this is my cat—notions
35:45 more or less general. The notion of cat is general; that particular cat, mine, is individual. I'll finally answer Raphaël's question about the individual and the subject—I've grouped the questions a bit to save time. So the understanding proceeds by concept, and philosophy does the same—so there are concepts, some of which are a priori, and then there are empirical intuitions: the piano is rather cold, but there will be a sound, the light blinds me—those are sensations, that's what Kant calls intuitions, in the ancient sense, intueri, that is, to see, originally. So there are empirical intuitions, abstract concepts, and it's the union of the two that forms knowledge. Well, I won't go back over that, it's a classic body of doctrine. But what Kant introduces for the first time
36:56 is a notion that seems completely scandalous with respect to this opposition: pure intuitions. In principle, an intuition is seeing, hearing, etc.—there are two fundamental pure intuitions in his thought, space and time. These are not concepts, they are the conditions for the appearance of any intuition—or rather, of any sensation, if you prefer. You'll understand this very concretely: if I come back from the planet Mars thanks to a fictional space voyage, and I come back with a bag, all the spectators are on tenterhooks for what I'm going to pull out of my bag. I tell them: you're going to see an object no one has ever seen on Earth. You see the suspense—we expect something radically new. But no—the intelligent subject will be the one who, before I open my bag and take out this object coming from Mars, or a fortiori from Sirius, already knows before seeing. That's the a priori—it's already knowing that if it's an object, it occupies a space
38:06 and that this space is not infinite, it is limited—otherwise it's not an object, I'd have had trouble fitting it into my bag. So it has a shape, an outline, which may be regular like a polygon or irregular like a pebble, whatever form—that's already a lot of things. It has a mass—well, unless that mass can be converted into energy, that depends a bit on the states of matter. There's a lot to know a priori about what makes something an object. In fact, the problem is the notion of object, which doesn't come from science—you see, we always come back to my fundamental opposition between everyday language and properly scientific expression, a series of equations which your humble servant doesn't understand much of once it goes beyond a certain level—and it goes beyond that level pretty quickly, you see. But as soon as we want to popularize and translate it into the terms of ordinary language, natural language, to speak rigorously as linguists say—'natural,' that's almost a contradiction in terms
39:16 when we want to express it in natural language, we suddenly find difficulties inherent in the relationship between words and things. Take the notion of object—after all, what do I call an object? Is an electron an object? Ask physicists—in quantum mechanics it's not obvious, we now know that there is neither a well-defined position nor a well-defined velocity, you see. Well, let's leave the details aside. The distinction Kant makes—I come back to it—philosophy proceeds by concept, mathematics by construction of concept. And now I come back to the example cited by Ludovic: the straight line is the shortest path. His friend tells him that the shortest path makes us exit the concept of a straight line. Kant says: very well, give a philosopher a triangle—here, I take a triangle, I throw it into the philosopher's hands, hup, you see, philosopher there, like catching a ball in basketball, catches the triangle—and Kant says this:
The sum of the angles of the triangle and fruitful confusion 40:26 ask the philosopher to deduce from everything this concept tells him—without going outside it—that the sum of its angles is 180 degrees. He has everything the concept of triangle gives: three angles, three sides, a surface enclosed by these three sides. Still, from that alone, one cannot guess that the sum of the angles equals 180 degrees. I made you a little diagram, I don't know if you can see it well, but to show you the classical proof, you know—the proof is grandpa's geometry, it's very classical: we extend the sides, you see, here at the top the vertex A, we extend the sides with a system for identifying angles, what's called alternate interior angles. Here it's easy to show that the three angles, you see, that are here, that lie on this straight line parallel to the base, if you will—it's easy to see that these three angles can be identified
41:36 with the three vertices of the triangle, with those that make up the three vertices of the triangle, if you prefer. And so, almost by demonstration—not even almost, it's barely a demonstration—we deduce that the sum of the three angles equals 180 degrees. Yes, says Kant, but we have exited the concept of triangle. The fruitfulness of the mathematician compared to the philosopher is that he is not analytic, contrary to a tradition going back almost always—mathematics, especially geometry, being taken as the model of analysis. Not at all—we have exited the concept of triangle with the mathematician, we have extended a side, we have extended this triangle, so that means we have something other than the concept of triangle—we have a whole outer space given to us, on which we can work. So there is indeed a synthesis, unbeknownst to us, made between this space and the very limited one that only the concept of triangle gave us. So bravo to the friend—I'll use a periphrasis, I don't know his first name—of Ludovic, who told him that the proof
42:46 that it was a synthetic judgment is that the notion of shortest path made us exit the triangle, and that it was necessary—yes—to exit it in order to see whether one had to go, as I told you, below the surface of the water to get the shortest path in the linear sense, you see, but then one must exit the ocean's plane surface. In short, we were, without knowing it, on a curvilinear space—here's a curvilinear triangle, as it's called. So thank you very much for this excellent question, and generally speaking, what I've just told you about Kant allows us to guard against the hesitation Ludovic had, and to be better equipped for the distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments. Once again, it's about really retaining from the concept only what it gives us to think, no more—we must not smuggle in notions that aren't in the concept itself. Last time I gave a very simple example where it's obvious—it's not always obvious—when I said there are yellow dogs, I mean, and that is not contained in the concept of dog, the color yellow, a priori. So I was told
43:56 all judgments of experience, empirical judgments, are synthetic judgments—not very certain—and conversely, analytic judgments are certain but don't increase my knowledge, they're rather sterile. There you go. So I repeat, this is the end of Raphaël's question: I would have said it was a matter of an analytic judgment—the straight line is the shortest path to go from one point to another—since it seems to be, and I say 'seems' deliberately, a property of the straight line. But a friend pointed out to me that to affirm such a proposition, one had to consider the set of all possible paths, and therefore, and he puts in quotes the important verb, 'exit'—the same one Kant uses in his example of the triangle that he throws into the paws of the philosopher, who doesn't exit it—and so, thereby, exit—parenthesis, sic—so he, Kant, visibly does exit the concept of the straight line. I remained quite confused—that's the rest of his question, which is entirely to his credit. To reassure him, I told him that this state of confusion is one of the most fruitful in philosophy. Socrates
45:06 his interlocutors often compared him to the torpedo—we say in English the torpedo fish, you know, the little ray that gives an electric shock when you touch it—because these questions, these aporias, made one feel a bit stupid compared to the questions one had beforehand. And Socrates would say to his interlocutor: courage, you are in the throes of childbirth. There's nothing more fruitful than this kind of confusion that follows an effort of elucidation and understanding. 'I remained quite confused'—well, thank you for your work, both yours and the association's. There you go, thanks to the team. And now to Geoffrey Stigl's question: good evening, following the last session, I would like to thank Dominique for his answer—you know, I had said that it's not with an axe that one can decide on a point where the cursor stops and from which, that particular year, on December 31 at midnight, one passes from the zoological order to the anthropological order, you see—suspecting well that Geoffrey fully agreed that it doesn't happen exactly
The cursor between the natural order and the anthropological order 46:16 like that. Good evening, following the last session I would like to thank Dominique for his answer and submit this little addition to him, because I may have lacked clarity during the live session. The cursor, which doesn't exist spatially, is temporal—OK, you remember I said this cursor doesn't exist in space, it's a long process in time that leads from the natural order to the anthropological order, and so it's more in time than in space. If man is history, he is not in history, he is history. If he is temporal, he nonetheless exists—very true, I would even say to Geoffrey, to encourage him in his persistence in maintaining that there is a cursor, that it exists all the more because it is in time—a cursor, after all, is made to move. As far as I know, 'cursus' makes one think more of time than of space—there are indeed watercourses, you know, but that's precisely the example Heraclitus uses, the river, to say we never bathe twice in the same river
47:26 and to give us access to the notion, so little empirical, of becoming. So if he is temporal, he nonetheless exists—we agree on that—and if he exists, it is indeed a passage, at a given moment, or gradually with time, from the naturalistic order to the anthropological order. I wonder what nature it could be. Excellent question—because it was natural, it would belong to physics, chemistry, biology to answer it. If it does not exist as a rupture—I spoke of my axe blow—as a sudden passage from legislation by necessity to legislation by freedom—I'm very pleased that Geoffrey takes up the Kantian distinction by modifying the words, which shows he has understood: instead of saying legislation by nature, he says legislation by necessity—he has understood well that nature is the realm of necessity, within which human action seeks to expand
48:36 despite all the alienations you know it's subject to, it seeks to expand the kingdom of freedom, to make itself a small, trembling place at first, you see, within the kingdom of freedom—this opposition between the empire, look at the vocabulary, of necessity—the empire strikes back, you see, the empire is always the bad guy—and the kingdom of freedom, from Engels, a great classic, you know—thanks to praxis, gradually, when it is collective, non-alienated, and freed from the exploitation of man by man—that's a lot of conditions—but even when there are class relations, I mean, to build a bridge over a river that required impossible detours, I mean, that's progress for the community anyway. And when I go outside, I'm quite happy not to have my feet in the mud or on the ice, but to use the sidewalk—thank you, Abdallah, and his jackhammer—I say this
49:46 to illustrate the fact that Marx says that in the social production of their existence, men enter into determined relations, necessary and independent of their will. It wasn't—it wasn't my aim to enter into a relationship with Abdallah when I went outside, but objectively, Marx would say, I am in a relationship with him from the moment I walk on the sidewalk he produced. It's like desire—when I reflect on myself, I'm not aware of it, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. So if this cursor exists, then—now this becomes interesting—that would imply that it comes from a dimension of being that we don't know, a non-natural dimension. You can see he's hesitant about his vocabulary, which is good—he doesn't dare say supernatural—a metaphysical dimension—that means, in Greek, supernatural, meta means beyond, it's the equivalent of the Latin trans, metaphysica, physis is nature. There you go, a metaphysical dimension—well put. It's that matter itself contains this distinction, if the passage is made from the natural order
50:56 to the non-natural order, it's because matter is capable of it. And here I find that Geoffrey is much more rigorous in his way of speaking, and I thank him for it, than most of those who reflect on these notions, including those who have scientific references but aren't used to translating them into everyday language—they're more comfortable in equations, apparently—because he does say that there isn't here a dialectic of nature but a dialectic of matter. So let's try to see this clearly: one that is not due to an effect of human action, and matter—well, call it, depending on the philosophical, cultural schools, in contemporary anthropology
52:06 spiritual—on Hegel's account, it's spirit that is opposed to nature, but spirit in Hegel is also tools and the hammer, historical, in more Marxist terms. There you go—and so I don't say 'metaphysical' by accident—it's not wrong that it's beyond physics, provided we don't make it into a beyond, like an other-world, in the more critical sense as well—both Hegel and Nietzsche, for once, agree on one point—it's not metaphysical in the idealist sense of a cosmos noetos as in Plato, of a higher intelligible world one could only enter after death or before birth. No, no, no—a burial axe in prehistory, we find many in Neolithic tombs, a burial axe buried with the corpse, I mean, is something strictly supernatural—if we don't want the value judgment, I understand very well, we can at least say
53:16 non-natural, then. So there, rather than 'metaphysical,' I would say 'aphysical,' if we could dare this barbarism. So I repeat, this key moment of Geoffrey's question: if it exists—I wonder what nature it could be—if it does not exist as a rupture, as a sudden passage from legislation by necessity, nature, to legislation by freedom, history—that would imply that it comes from a dimension of being that we don't know, a metaphysical dimension—it's that matter itself contains this distinction, and man is only its expression. This passage would then be the most accomplished expression of freedom—parenthesis, dialectic of matter—you see, his formulation is fairly rigorous. I'll skip the rest, not that it's uninteresting, but I'd rather devote time to it another time, with other participants who are part of our association and who are much more versed in the hard sciences than I am—I'm thinking of Erwan, of Thomas
54:26 or of Étienne, for example—they aren't mathematicians and physicists where we'll talk about what he says about Maxwell's laws and the relationship between determinism and freedom, roughly. So thank you very much for these questions—just a small correction on the last part I communicated, namely that man would be the most accomplished expression of freedom—I would say instead that the cursor keeps advancing. That's my most complete answer to the question he asked last time and the one he extends today. I can't be clearer than that: the passage from zoology to anthropology, from the natural order—but we come directly from the animal—to the human order, is always in the process of happening. I still have to eat to live, even though it's been thousands of years since the act of eating
55:37 long ago—since the act of eating stopped being satisfied with merely answering pure biological needs of nutrition, but already corresponds—once again, it doesn't go back—to a need for conviviality, for setting the table, for cooking, for the preparation of food, if only that—everything that doesn't add much to the purely biological program of nutrition. And one could say the same of the other instincts, sexuality, which in the order of nature only makes sense in relation to the interests of the species and not the individual—on the contrary, it demands that the individual take risks—many creatures give their lives during the mating season, individuals matter less than the species reproducing. Sexuality continues, in order to reproduce the human species, to make use of something that comes from nature and is sexuality, but on the other hand, the modalities we impose on this sexuality—in eros, not marriage, not only marriage, eros in general, the romantic, whatever you like—go far beyond
56:48 those who naively believe, oh, I don't care, it's nature that counts, the rest is poetry—those are generally the ones who are most meticulously attached to libidinal quirks. I'm not blaming them, that's their business, they're quite right to have their quirk after all. So there you go—and when I say the cursor keeps advancing, that's why I justify saying there isn't a moment, you see, not even one where we can say, well, that's it, we've evolved for a million years and now we've passed—yes, we keep extending, we try to extend the kingdom of freedom at the expense of the empire of necessity. I could well—but careful here, and I quote Rousseau, you know, well I use the famous passage that I quote fairly often from chapter 8 of book 1 of the Social Contract, which is precisely titled 'On the Civil State,' and which speaks, which develops—and I refer Geoffrey to it, but I think he must have read it anyway—whose subject is not
Rousseau, The Social Contract: the passage to the civil state 58:01 the state of nature, nor the civil state—that's how I put it earlier: to nature one can oppose culture in Lévi-Strauss, history in Marx, spirit—one could very well say, in Rousseau, the civil state as opposed to the state of nature. Well, what matters in the passage I'm talking about, chapter 8 of book 1 of the Social Contract, is not the state of nature, it's not the civil state, it's the passage itself—precisely what Geoffrey's question is about. Now what does Rousseau say? You see this demonstrative, it points to the passage—this passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked. It is only then that the voice—the voice of duty succeeding that of appetite—appetite is a metonymy here for instincts in general—succeeding appetite, and right succeeding physical impulse, that man, who until then had looked only at himself—until then he was only an individual
59:11 who had no account to give to anything or anyone, except perhaps at the level of nature—he won't go very far there. Man, who until then had looked only at himself, finds himself forced to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before—listen, it's 'inclination'—inclination here takes up 'instinct' and 'appetite'—although he deprives himself, in this new state—there begins—what do we gain, what do we lose—although he deprives himself in this new state, in the civil state, of the advantages he derives from nature, he gains such great ones in return, colon: his faculties are exercised and developed—I've often developed this, so I won't go back over it—language becomes thought thanks to language, you know, consciousness gains access to thought and to the tool—his faculties are exercised and developed, his passions are ennobled—we saw this earlier, sexuality becomes happy—his passions are ennobled, his whole soul is elevated, to such a point that—and here
1:00:22 there is this famous reservation which gives a chill when one thinks that the 'mal du siècle' associated with Rousseau was followed by the century of evil, that of world wars and atrocities—his whole soul is elevated to such a point that, if the abuses of this new condition did not degrade him below that from which he emerged—never has anyone been as precise as Rousseau. There, we don't skip over the negative and evil, we dig into it—we're no longer in the Greek statue, we're in suffering. 'Did not degrade him often below that from which he emerged'—how can one be below the bestiality of the animal? That's what he's saying—it's true that the animal never does evil or good, for that matter, it's not beyond good and evil, it's below good and evil, you see. So, if the abuses of this new condition did not degrade him often below
1:01:32 that from which he emerged—there you have the meaning of evil—he should, but this is a hypothesis, you see the conditional, he should bless without ceasing the happy moment—here Rousseau seems to think of a passage that would have happened in an instant, but that's mythical—the happy moment that tore him away from it forever. Rousseau knows very well that it's irreversible, just as in the Old Testament, in Genesis, it's said that one cannot go back to the earthly paradise, there's the angel, there's the sword of fire that guards the entrance, or the exit, as you like—one cannot go back there. He should bless without ceasing the happy moment that tore him away from it forever, and which, from a stupid and limited animal, made an intelligent being and a man. There you go—well, that's already an hour and a half, I have the impression—ah, good, good, very well—so I have time to tackle Hölderlin's text, but first, still, wait, there's another question from Jacques Carcin
Balzac: "natural law and the code are enemies" 1:02:42 I don't know if I'll have time to answer it—let Jacques not worry, I will answer it, but perhaps not in full during this session, either I'll answer in writing on our channels, our networks, or at the next session. Hello—in my summer reading I came across this, which echoes some themes addressed during your sessions—you see, all the questions overlap somewhere. Here's the text: every married woman learns at her own expense the social laws which are incompatible in many respects with those of nature—hop, you see, the opposition Kant made, perhaps the most interesting moment in the Critique of Judgment's introduction, namely that there are indeed two domains, the domain of nature, the domain of necessity, as Geoffrey put it so well, and that of freedom—but that there is only one and the same territory over which these two domains contend, the strength of nature being that it needs to do nothing—it's inertia, nature needs to do nothing to occupy the ground, the ground is hers from the start. On the other hand
1:03:52 the domain by freedom remains a reverie and dominates nothing at all if it does not realize, within the phenomenon occupied by nature, the end which is its essence—if it does not pass into existence. That's why I took the example of the Indian village, you know, in Amazonia, and I said we must indeed cut the grass, cut the trees, a forest or a marsh must cease to be for a field or a village to be. There, the opposition of the two domains is no longer intellectual, it's not between partisans of determinism and those of freedom—no, no, no, there it's praxis that has the answer. Now, you see here we find again the opposition between the married woman—so marriage, an institution, opposed to instinct—every married woman learns at her own expense the social laws which are incompatible in many respects with those of nature. One could have, in marriage, a dozen children, I'll tell you right away, it's an excerpt from an admirable book by Balzac, the journal of two young married people, a little-known work
1:05:03 but which is a masterpiece. One could have, in marriage, a dozen children, marrying at the age we are, in the era we're in, and if we had them we would commit twelve crimes—at that time there were few households, few families who had the means to feed twelve children. Marrying at the age we are, and if we had them, we would commit twelve crimes, we would create twelve misfortunes—would we not deliver charming beings to misery and despair, whereas two children are two joys, two blessings, two creations in harmony with present customs and laws—the natural law and the code. So nature here, and history, culture, spirit, whatever you like, instinct and institution, are enemies—there, it's Balzac speaking again, and we are the ground on which he struggles. So thank you very much, Jacques, who has perfectly understood what Kant says, and who sees its fruitfulness since he finds it in Balzac, who certainly wasn't thinking of Kant at all when he wrote this, you know—natural law and the code are enemies, and we, human beings, have this privilege—the pebble is in opposition with nothing, the pebble is not in opposition with the roadworker's sledgehammer that's going to smash it
The sublime: Kant saw everything but drew the curtain 1:06:13 and crush it—it's not alive, it doesn't risk dying. Natural law and the code are enemies, and we are the ground on which they struggle. There you go—so you see, we've come back again to the problems addressed by the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, enriched by negativity according to Hegel, and we saw this in the text about the young children throwing circles into the water last time, but we saw that going below the surface is somewhat going to meet risks and perils. That's what wasn't in Kant, I'll say this for those interested who want to dig deeper into the Kantian critique—Kant brushes against this problem when he introduces, for the first time in the history of what's called, rather, of what constitutes the aesthetic field—even if it wasn't called that before the 18th century, since I told you the term is recent—Kant doesn't content himself
1:07:23 with making a science of the beautiful—he also tackles the concept of the sublime, which was entirely new at the time, coexisting with the very first emergence not of Romanticism, since the word didn't yet exist, but of pre-Romanticism—perhaps the deepest moment of Romanticism, its very first emergence, what's called in German the Frühromantik, the very first Romanticism, before it became a mere rhetoric, often, and became commonplace. So when he introduces the sublime, right there, the forms art deals with—when you think he's contemporary with Beethoven, that makes you think—it's no longer harmony, balance, it's the figure of the storm, figures of infinity that pose a permanent challenge to consciousness: your faculty of unifying, harmonizing, balancing, I put it in check at every moment through the abyss and the infinite. That's the aesthetics of the sublime that was beginning to emerge at that time. There, I say this to be honest with Kant—it's the only domain where Kant opens the door not to excess, since he's careful not to venture that far either, but you see, he clearly distinguishes it
1:08:33 from the aesthetics of the beautiful—it's not beautiful, this makes a strong impression on us and can provide an aesthetic pleasure, but it's not of the order of the beautiful, it's of the order of the sublime. And here I recall—I wouldn't want all these little sessions, my interventions, I've already said this, it's not about being too directive either, but still, I wouldn't want it to be like the road unfolding in the rearview mirror, never to return—I recall that I made two interventions devoted to the response Michel Clouscard gave to the article Gérard Mordillat had devoted to him, and in one of his responses, the second I believe, yes that's right, the second—I recall a fundamental quip of Gérard Mordillat, as often it's in his quips that he's most dizzyingly profound, and which is directly connected to the problems we're stirring up right now, when he says: Kant saw everything, but immediately drew the curtain. He saw
1:09:43 that the subject was behind it, that what we believed was the object is only a projection—the beautiful object, I didn't say the medication I'm currently taking, but the beautiful object is this screen on which the subject is reflected. But what he didn't see, or didn't want to see, in any case what he drew the curtain over, is everything that can stir on this surface—monsters can arise there, and here we didn't have to wait, you see, only for Romanticism and the sublime—look at the gargoyles on cathedrals, or the recumbent tomb figures, you know, where corpses gnawed by worms are shown, carved in stone, you know—to show that this goes back a long way. So there, I'm now moving on to Hölderlin's text, which should give us a rest from these abstractions—though I know some who told me they didn't understand much of it. Well, I'll reassure them too
The late Hölderlin, parataxis, and a reading of "German Song" 1:10:53 it's among the most difficult texts there are, the texts of the late Hölderlin. I'm showing it here in close-up, I hope there's enough light for it to be visible—there are gaps, you see, in Hölderlin's writing, there are gaps here, there's the beginning of a sentence that doesn't finish, there are nouns without verbs at times. Well, those who find this annoying, or intriguing, or interesting—none of this is contradictory—I refer them to a volume available from Garnier Flammarion by Adorno, by Theodor Adorno, from the Frankfurt School, who wrote a superb essay called Parataxis in Hölderlin, Hölderlin and parataxis, depending a bit on the translation—what's called parataxis, as a figure of speech, is precisely this, what's called telegraphic style, you know: 'me pick up 11am you see take train tomorrow pick up'—well, yeah, parataxis, the sentence with gaps in it. And I recommend
1:12:04 this book all the more since Adorno courageously takes on the one who tried to monopolize Hölderlin, for the worse rather than for the better—I'm thinking of Heidegger—by confusing him on one very specific point, but I won't get into that here, it would take us too far afield. So, German song—I'll read it first in full: When the drunken, inspiring morning rises / and the bird begins its song / and rays the river casts / and faster downward / the rough path goes over the rock, since the sun has warmed it / and the [gap] desiring in another land the young people [gap] / and the gate awakens and the marketplace. Well, there are gaps, but we can clearly see it continues the crescendo of everything awakening at dawn. And the gate awakens and the marketplace, and from the holy flames of the hearth the red vapor rises—that had begun with 'when the drunken, inspiring morning rises,' and there, the red vapor rises, you see there's still a continuity despite the gaps, and rises—but wait, when did this begin? With 'when the morning'—and we still don't have the main clause
1:13:14 it's an immense subordinate clause—I understand that one might be thrown off when unfamiliar with this, you know—and the main clause, the last one delays it, here it is: then silence falls—sorry, I'll say it, I won't interrupt myself, so I won't do it again. Then he keeps calm in his breast, his heart, and dreams in the solitary portico—yet when he is then seated in deep shadow, when overhead the elm murmurs to the brook that exhales coolness, the German poet, and he sings—when he has water, holily sober, for his purposes, listening far off in the calm to the song of the soul—and still, is he too full of spirit, and the pure soul, until, enraged, he [gap] and his cheek burns with shame, a [gap] the accent of the song [gap]—last part—yet smile at the simplicity of this man
1:14:24 smile, plural, at the simplicity of this man—the stars which, coming from the prophetic East, dwell over the mountains of our people, and as the father's hand rested on his hair on the day of childhood—and here there's a crescendo, sorry—thus crowned, trembling, the center, a sign, the head of the heath—when you, you who because of your beauty have remained nameless to this day, O most divine one, O good spirit of the homeland, may his word rest in the song of a man. Full stop. So it's much clearer than it seemed, no longer so opaque, once we know it begins with a great subordinate clause, you know—the subordinate clause relates to everything that happens, everything connected to the dawn, you know—it's said in a magnificent way, but I mean, it's more or less all the same things, the dawn, you know—we go from immobility to movement, from darkness to light, from coolness to the sun that begins to warm things a little, all of that. So, when the morning
Intoxication and sobriety, light and shadow: the structure of the poem 1:15:37 drunken and inspiring rises—if you want to simplify, of course it hurts, not to butcher it, I'm not going to butcher it, but it hurts to reduce, to schematize such an admirable text—but take a sheet of paper like this, you know, like this, make a two-column table, you draw a line here so that everything on the left is the opposite of what's on the right. We said earlier: nature, culture, instinct, institution—and instead of what we just said, you write, you see, 'when the drunken, inspiring morning rises,' you take the word 'drunken,' you skip a page, 'when he has water, holily sober, for his purposes'—opposition of drunkenness and sobriety—that's not interpretation, that's in the text, it's a dichotomy. We're going to try to clarify by anchoring ourselves to sharply drawn oppositions—well, at the beginning it's light, and rays
1:16:48 the slow river—and faster downward—light and heat go together—the rough path over the rock, since the sun has warmed it—so I skip again to the passage where there's the German poet: then he is seated in deep shadow—opposition of shadow and light. So in the first part of the poem there's drunkenness, light, crescendo, heat, and when we come to the German poet—that is, not only to the subject of the whole sentence but to the main clause that organizes the poem—when we get there, there's shadow opposed to light—not night, shadow, night will come at the end—shadow, coolness, the brook that exhales coolness, when overhead the elm murmurs to the brook that exhales coolness. So there you go, the elm gives shade, the shade is cooler than staying in the sun, there's the proximity of the brook and its murmur which echoes the bird that was singing in the very first part—when the drunken, inspiring morning rises and the bird begins its song—it's much more, much more organized
1:17:58 than one might think, this poem—and when he has water, holily sober, enough drunk, listening—whereas there were mostly visions in the first part, yes, it's light, everything the light lets us see, suddenly the red vapor from the hearth, the marketplace stirring—whereas here there are sounds, you see, listening far off in the calm to the song of the soul, not the light of bodies, but the song of the soul. So that's a little tip to show why this—why this delay of the main clause, of the subject, well after the beginning of the poem. I repeat this beginning, up until we reach the main clause: when the drunken, inspiring morning rises and the bird begins its song, and rays the river casts, and faster downward the rough path goes over the rock, since the sun has warmed it, and the [gap] desiring in another land the young people—well, there are gaps here, but now we understand better something, which is that the young people—whereas look, the poet, the German poet, he is alone, then he is seated
The poet alone, measure, and the night of the stars 1:19:08 In the deep shadow, you see – excuse me – so he keeps his heart calm in his breast and muses in the solitary portico, you see, we must not interpret the words, the poet answers us, alone in the shade and the coolness, set here against the crowd that was beginning to stir, I don't know, in the marketplace, in the street, no matter, children on their way to school – a wonderful excerpt from the ages of man in Shakespeare's As You Like It, isn't it, and then the schoolboys with that face, you know, waking up in the morning as if with caterpillars on their cheeks, and going off, dragging their feet unwillingly to school. So you see, so from the very start it is silent, alone – the subject, right from the beginning, it is alone. So it is silent, alone. So he keeps calm.
1:20:19 The word comes back several times – 'in his breast, his heart' – you see why insist on this calm: because there is, in enthusiasm, ex-centric in the proper sense, you see, you widen the center, and the young men longing for another country – now we understand better why suddenly the space widened, it seemed enigmatic what other countries were doing here – the young men, and the gateway awakens, and the marketplace, you see, everywhere there is a collective, vast, extended space, as Hölderlin says elsewhere: may the homeland not become for us a cramped little space, but one where the feet can stretch out. And by contrast, so he is silent, alone – but this is not at all a love of solitude, it's not the pleasure of being alone, it's the need to be alone in order to protect oneself from the previous clamor, from the solar clamor, you see. Here we can clearly see that the beauty of the poem lies in the modernity
1:21:29 of the problem it expresses, which has been ours since the beginning of modernity – this kind of absolute romanticism, quite different from the academic romanticism that often followed, with its banalities and academicism. So here I come back to the main clause: at the beginning he doesn't say who – there's a pronoun, 'he.' So, first 'he': so it is silent, alone. Second 'he': so, second, so he keeps calm in his breast, his heart – in other words his heart is pounding, as ours does before the dawn. Look at what Rimbaud does with dawn in the Illuminations: 'I lifted the veils one by one across the plain, where I denounced it to the rooster' – you see, well, that's it. And he muses in the solitary portico – notice that the portico also provides shelter, you see, it imposes a limit on verticality. The very first line: when the morning, drunk, breathing, rises, and then, and the red vapor rises, you see, these ascending forces
1:22:39 here is the portico setting it a limit, exactly as in the Greek temple the tympanum came to impose the metron, the measure, so as not to reach hubris against the verticality of the columns. You see, so this recourse here to balance is not that of the Greeks aiming to create a kind of harmony, it's to protect oneself from a danger. So he sits in the deep shadow – so, excuse me, though – just when you'd think the subordinate clause is going to resume, and right away this time it breaks off, so he returns to his main subject: so he sits in the deep shadow, when above his head a man murmurs – we still don't know who – by the brook that exhales coolness, comma – the German poet, we have to wait for that line to finally, finally begin, to finally get the subject in the grammatical sense, not all these predicates of calm, of shade, of coolness – and sings, when he has drunk, sacredly sober, at its springs, listening far off, in the calm again, decidedly
1:23:49 the song of the soul, and there is this astonishing phrase, again, twice: 'is his spirit still too full' – there's the excess of hubris, too much, that's one of the measures, despite all his efforts – that's us, that's us moderns, we try; some resort to happy sobriety, some go jogging every day to atone for their whisky and their evening out – before, people confessed every Saturday to be forgiven their sins, then started sinning again during the week – it's a bit the same, jogging is the penance. I say this because it was Clinton, or was it, who had a heart attack while jogging – I don't remember if it was Carter or Clinton, I think it was Clinton actually – yes, it's not certain that's so good; right now when I see them, they're purple, congested, you can feel there's an effort at purification. Well, let's leave the irony aside – this isn't Heine, who wields irony to perfection, this is Hölderlin. So, again, again, is his spirit still too full
1:24:59 That means: even drinking only water – it's symbolic, of course – even fleeing every temptation to intoxication, he does not attain measure: 'I never attain, as I wish, measure' – he says this in another poem, otherwise I won't announce it like that, you know, I'm not going to interpret it. 'And yet smiles at the simplicity of this man' – and that's the last part; I skipped a somewhat enigmatic passage, but you can feel there's a break, a violence: 'and the cheek burns with shame' – there's something torn open in the field, something that's broken. It's no accident there's a gap; there's something repressed that must stay underground for now, so I'll leave it aside for now. 'Yet smile' – plural – 'at the simplicity of this man, the stars' – and here we started with dawn, and now we're at night, having passed through the hottest moment, at noon, in the shade of the elm murmuring near the brook that exhales coolness. What a unity of time – this poem isn't as disjointed as it seems, you see. This time there is no more solar danger. 'Yet they smile'
1:26:10 'at the simplicity of this man, the stars, coming from the prophetic Orient' – the reference is no longer Greece, no longer Apollo, no longer that compromise between light and balance and shadow – no, it's night, the Oriental night, infinity, the stars of the prophetic Orient, for the Orient is the homeland of the prophets for young theologians. 'Coming from the prophetic Orient, over the mountains of our people they dwell' – and where the stars move, isn't it, they're not always in the same place, but sometimes they hang suspended above us in the West, they dwell – 'and as the father's hand rested on his hair' – there's an image here of extreme care, isn't there – I'm making a hypothesis, this isn't an interpretation, it's a hypothesis – the hair is the highest part of the body, so it's linked to the stars, as if the radiance of the stars were like a hand laid on the German poet's hair, you see – 'and as the father's hand rested on his hair'
Reading of Hölderlin's "To the Poets" 1:27:21 'in the days of childhood' – implied, which now seems far away. 'He is bareheaded' – I say bareheaded because in another poem I recommend to you, called 'To the Poets,' dedicated to poets in general, plural, Hölderlin explains that the senses – listen, I'll quote you a small passage anyway, it will be simpler than paraphrasing it, it's a poem where he says what is the function of the poet in society, so that's no small thing – here it is, I'll go fast because it's clearer: 'As on a day of rest a peasant goes' – as on a holiday, a peasant goes to look at his fields in the morning, when all through the brilliant night, unceasingly, lightning has flashed, whose stormy afternoon, icy and dull, the storm on the horizon subsides – the aesthetics of the sublime – 'and rumbles still,' we still hear rumbling in the distance, but it's calm, as Hugo says, 'all is peaceful, happy, and appeased, God watches' – 'and rumbles still, the river returns to its banks'
1:28:31 it had overflowed, it had gone beyond measure, 'the river returns to its banks, a coolness of grass greening the ground, and the beneficent rain of heaven streams down from the vine, gold, the trees of the grove gleam standing in the peace of the sun' – like the German poet, the trees of the grove are indifferent to all this agitation that followed the storm, to this kind of illumination in the Rimbaldian sense, all these meteors that make this splendor – it doesn't stop the trees from remaining calm, imagine the poplars in the wind swaying like that, the ones on Rousseau's tomb, that would be perfect – 'standing in the peace of the sun are the trees of the grove.' So I say to myself, but you told us, you were talking to us about poets – here you are, you see, the new reversal, in fact he was talking about poets: 'such are you, standing beneath favorable skies, you poets shaped by a single master, you who, taught by the light lake of her ever-present magic, beautiful, divinely powerful nature' – I'll go fast because it's clear – 'that is why when for a whole season she seems to sleep' – so that's in winter, when she seems to sleep for a whole season, in the sky or among the plants
1:29:41 or among the peoples, the poets too are in mourning in winter, they seem abandoned, and yet they sense the future, as she too in her rest is only presentiment – 'struck by the infinite, long known, this memory has trembled, and by the fire of the lightning, may fruit be born of love, the work of men and gods, the song finds its birth' – the poem is a compromise between excess, which is the affair of the gods, isn't it, and the world of man. The poet is the one charged with receiving the shock in order to redistribute it to men, diminished, cushioned if you will, without danger. So I tell it to you this way first because it's clearer, you see, and, and that's why I tell you the conclusion: 'and that is why the sons of earth, you and I, can now without peril dip their lips into the heavenly fire; but it is to us, nonetheless, the poets, that it falls to remain standing' – bareheaded, you see, it's no longer the portico here, it's up to us, there's no father's hand on the hair, 'it is to us, nonetheless'
1:30:51 to remain standing bareheaded, O poet, beneath the storms of God, to seize with our own hand the father's ray, the lightning itself, and to offer to the crowd, beneath its veil of song, the gift of heaven – as if it were necessary that it be veiled, that our heart, like a child's heart, be pure, that our hands be free of fault; the pure ray, the pure lightning will not burn us, and in its supreme shaking, its pain united to the pain of a god, the heart will remain firm forever. There, I wanted to bring in this intertextuality, you see. So I return to the German poem: 'and yet, as the father's hand rested on his hair in the days of childhood, thus crowned' – trembling, the center, a sign at the head of hatred – 'when you, you' – there's this mysterious 'you,' whereas until now there was no second person, you know, there was the poet speaking about what was happening around him – 'when you, you' – there is no longer something, there's suddenly someone who, because of your beauty, has remained until this day nameless – so what is it? Is it God, is it the Grail, is it the absolute, is it the sun
The spirit of the homeland: Beethoven, Schiller, and Hegel 1:32:02 of the cave? No, the answer is there: 'O good spirit of the homeland' – and here comes a political dimension, you see, you thought I'd forgotten my aesthetic point – and political too, isn't it, the same birth year as Hölderlin's birth, 1770, is also Hegel's birth year – it's also Beethoven's birth year. Beethoven's Ninth crosses abysses of despair – there's even funeral music at the end of the first movement, it's one of the very rare movements to end in a minor key – and suddenly there's this famous chorus with the Ode to Joy triumphing at the end, isn't it, and because salvation has become collective, isn't it, it's the whole of humanity, moreover, in Schiller's poem, while Beethoven in music: 'Seid umschlungen, Millionen' – let us prostrate ourselves, millions of beings. I recall that the very last words of the Phenomenology of Spirit are a quotation from Schiller – the very last words, where the absolute – Hegel writes still these last words to him – 'without whom'
1:33:12 'he would be lifeless solitude' – but here is what makes there be a solution, and there he quotes Schiller: 'from the chalice of spirits' – there's the collectivity, the community, 'from the chalice of spirits foams up to him his own infinity.' So, 'when you, you, who because of your beauty have remained until this day nameless, O most divine one, O good spirit of the homeland, your word in the song of a man' – so the name is no longer a name like Peter-Paul-James, it's no longer a proper name, nor even a common noun, a judgment precisely that would be a concept – it's the unfolding of the song when it succeeds, when it's like here, a supreme poem that constitutes the naming of what is highest, of what he calls the homeland. You see how far we are from 'homeland' in the chauvinist or nationalist sense, in the sense — how do you say it — Rimbaud has a superb term — in the 'patriotroutic' sense, isn't it, patriotism
1:34:23 Rimbaud was exasperated to see the belligerent anti-Prussian talk in 1870-71. So there, that works, we're going to move to questions, but I wanted to finish on this, this extraordinary ending where it shifts to the second person: 'when you, you who had her beauty and remained nameless, O most divine one, good spirit of the homeland, your word in the song of a man.' I'd just like to end by opening a door, not closing one, for next time, or simply for your own reflections, hoping it will raise questions as interesting and pertinent as those with which I began: we also see, at the same time as an exceptional poetic achievement, we see the impasse of the aesthetic field in modernity. What I'm saying is serious. I come back to Hegel's famous claim — not that art is finished, he does say it will never cease to progress, to perfect itself — but that we can no longer count on it to proclaim the absolute
The impasse of the aesthetic field in modernity 1:35:33 we need a real transformation of the outer world, and not merely the symbolic figuration of that change through image and representation interposed. If there is representation — and in Hegel's logic, in his system, I mean in his systematics, art, like religion, has this deficiency compared to philosophy, which has the last word in the Encyclopedia, the pure concept — this handicap, even though they are revelations of the absolute thanks to art and religion, the absolute is not the bond between men, nor the bond to nature, which belongs to the hard sciences, which is something else entirely — this representation is proof that the essential is not present. If there is representation
1:36:43 it's because there is no presence — a bit like a tomb is there to signify someone's absence, to give a presence to their absence, to evoke their absence. I recall what we said well about negative theology. So there is an impasse here, it is time — as Rimbaud magnificently says, these are the very last words of A Season in Hell — he wants to attain a truth 'in one soul and one body,' he doesn't just want to have a soul too full, like the German poet, but 'in one soul and one body' — there's the trail I'm opening: the relation between art and praxis. I recall, and I'll finish with this before questions, that I had already pointed out last time that the Greeks used a single word, techne, to designate both the art of the sculptor who produces that wonder of the world, the statue of Diana of Ephesus, and the art of the shoemaker who makes sandals — there's techne
Newton, the empire of necessity, and the question of duty 1:37:53 instead of opposing them as we do. Are there any questions? So, yes, there's a question from Mal Efique — yes, can we say that what fed Kant's mind was: the synthetic judgment, that's Hume; the analytic judgment, that's Descartes? Thank you very much, Marie Mal Efique, faithful listener, whom I greet and who asks a very good question — she cites Hume and Descartes. So this gives me the occasion, and I thank her, to teach those who might not know it that there are three great influences that produced Kantianism: Newton, Hume, and Rousseau. In knowledge, it's the Newton-Hume pair; Rousseau comes into play only afterward, for action — we've already seen this — morality, politics, law, etc., in legislation
1:39:04 through freedom. But let's return to pure knowledge, which is accomplished rigorously only in science and in the natural sciences, and in Kant's time that means Newton, of course — but Hume throws a stone into the pond, the pond being: 'that's it, with Newton we've arrived, it's extraordinary' — finally a sentence a line and a half long that states the principle of universal gravitation: bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and inverse proportion to the square of their distance. The mind of this kind of earthworm that is man in the universe suddenly appropriates the principle of all the motions of the universe, all the motions that occur at a speed not too close to that of light — well, what a conquest, and above all, what Newton reveals, after Galileo, is the culmination of a process that began with what's called the scientific revolution, between the 16th and 17th centuries, between the Renaissance and the classical era — so Galileo, Descartes
1:40:14 Huygens, Kepler, etc., of course, and the chain of knowledge — so it goes very fast after that, it's the augury, the progression of science, and in Kant's time, and for a long time afterward, it culminates with Newton. What does it teach us, for us philosophers who are interested? That in its own field, in its own domain, to speak like Kant, the domain of natural science, there's no question of talking about freedom — on the contrary, there reigns the most implacable physical law, which admits no exception. I can run a red light — in human law it's not recommended, but well, it's possible, some people do it now and then, either because they're drunk, or because they take a risk, or they see there's nobody around at night, they think they're safe — it's always reckless, and in any case it's forbidden, but one can. But one cannot live without eating; one cannot — when I take a plate and throw it on the ground and it shatters into a thousand pieces, I cannot take the thousand pieces and throw them
1:41:24 and expect that to reconstitute the plate — that's called entropy. So what are we saying? We're saying that the more our knowledge succeeds, our rigorous knowledge, what we today call science — you might say the sciences — the more, in places where we thought there was will, freedom, spontaneity, nymphs in springs, a god making it rain — all that evaporates; it's rather the empire of necessity that asserts itself. So it's certainly not there — we're in the physical order now — Kant's conclusion, the philosopher's conclusion, is that it's certainly not in the natural domain that we should seek the principles of our moral action, the answer to the question 'what must I do?' You see how this makes us come back to Maléfique's question, thank you Marie — 'what must I do?' We saw last time that 'must' is taken here in the strong sense, that is, 'what must I do' when I can do this or its opposite
1:42:35 otherwise it's a matter of 'can I?' — I don't know — can I live without eating? No, that's impossible. Can I run a red light? Yes, but I must not — it's that kind of duty, the one I submit to even though I could transgress it, that is, it remains within freedom — what Kant calls this intermediate stage where I obey — when I obey, when I stop at the red light, I can't say that at that moment I'm no longer capable of it, but it's an intermediate status between freedom in the sense of absolute caprice and strict natural necessity — I am autonomous, that is, here the principle of the action is internal, not external. It happens to me — when I'm looking for a destination by car, well, when I used to drive and couldn't find it, I'd get lost, I'd tell myself, sometimes it happens that I'm Kantian, I'll go another 5 km on the odometer and then I'll turn back, whatever happens I'll finish — for all practical purposes I finish — the answer to the question. So this empire of necessity
1:43:47 seemed desperate: the more our knowledge extends, the more our hope shrinks that there be a domain where freedom is possible, where not everything is Y equals F of X without the converse also holding. And here Hume steps in: I say I put a pot on the fire, I wait for the water to boil — a pot of water, sorry — when it boils, I look at the thermometer, it reads 100 degrees. I run the experiment several times, the same thing happens each time. So I can write — I don't know if I 'must,' but I can write — 'water boils at 100 degrees' as a law of physics, as a principle of physics. Hume says: that's illegitimate, it's a gamble. I'm not saying it's false, he says — good Englishman that he is, an empiricist — he only states what experience shows, and experience does show that this water
Hume: causality founded on habit 1:44:57 when I test it here and now, or tomorrow at 5 o'clock, or the day after, boils at 100 degrees. But to make the leap, the salto mortale, the mortal leap, where I say everywhere and always, including in other galaxies, water boils at 100 degrees — that's a risk I'm taking that takes me outside the guarantee of experience. So I place my trust, and in fact what I take for the law — to quote Hume — 'an objective connection between phenomena,' I don't know, between the moon's movements and the tides for instance — is in fact due to habit, that is, a subjective principle: it's I who associate the two because I'm used to seeing them linked so often, because I've often experienced it myself. I ask an audience, among the following statements, which seem to you the most certain: the whole is greater
1:46:07 than the part; tomorrow it will be daylight; if A equals B, B equals A. Many say 'tomorrow it will be daylight,' and repeat it often as something self-evident — but in Lapland that's false, it won't be daylight for another six months — which proves that Hume isn't entirely wrong to say that what we often take for law, a principle of objective connection between phenomena, that is, one that would hold even if we weren't there, actually rests on a subjective principle, which is habit. And Kant summed up this initiative of Hume's in a now more-than-famous formula: 'Hume awoke me from my dogmatic slumber' — I was falling asleep on Newton, you see, everything is determined — that makes morality problematic: what's the use of asking 'what must I do' anyway, admitting even that I find the principle of the good, I won't have the means to realize it, since all my movements are determined, I have no choice, and so on, with a consistency that determinists in general do not have
1:47:17 isn't that right — so this is very important, what we're seeing here. So she's right, Maléfique, to say there's a tension between Hume's critique of causality — because that's scientific causality, which is not as self-evident as it seems — one could say that Kant's entire Critique of Pure Reason is a gigantic effort to try to account for causality. There, another time we'll see how he manages, but that's not tonight's subject. Are there any other questions? If I understood correctly, Philippe — in any case, thank you to Maléfique for this very good, epistemically sharp question. In that case, we'll go a few steps further next time, you'll see the plan, it will probably be next Wednesday, and it's possible we'll have a guest — I won't tell you the identity yet because there are several possibilities, but it's a format we've held dear for a long time and which we've often wrongly kept postponing
1:48:28 and this time it's going to become reality: we'll have a guest to whom we will put questions, and perhaps you too will have the chance to ask questions — someone that some of you know, at least through their works. There, I can't say more, so I'll say, probably, see you next Wednesday, thanking you a thousand times for your attendance and your participation.
