English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Recapitulating from the allegory of the cave 0:00 The time before last, the second-to-last session, I repeated the previous session rather than redoing it solo for a private individual. And that session was lost through a mishandling, was erased by mistake. So I mean, there's a break in the continuity and in the minimal memorization of our conversations. So today I judged it useful to do not a revision — I'm not going to bother you with that.
0:33 And besides, we can perfectly well progress by recapitulating, which is indeed what I intend to do today. And in principle, you shouldn't need me to do it. I mean, if you were... I'm going to talk like an old professor. If you were... I am an old professor, but I try not to talk like one. If you were attentive, I was going to say. I don't doubt that you are, but you may not have enough confidence in yourselves to see that if you think with a minimum of coherence, you should be able to find all the coherence that I don't always have myself with my detours.
1:06 What am I saying? I'm saying that I've marked out the path a little bit over the past 3-4 years. Since, let's say, 2014, the first workshops we did on the Right Bank at the time, in such a way that each time it forms a complete unit. And that each cycle ends, for those who might not be able to come back, without needing a sequel like for a TV series. And in particular, I'd refer, especially for newcomers who might want something other than the jungle of videos.
1:44 Because there are quite a few of them, and to find your way, I should specify that some are particularly useful for getting a more global view of the whole set of these cycles of talks. I'm thinking of the ones numbered 7-8 and 8-8. The ones that don't have a small number in front — a small number, I mean one, two or three at most — correspond to the very first year. I mean school year, that is, 2014-2015, when we began the cycle whose overall title was 'Between Crisis and War, Philosophizing.'
2:21 And which was made up of eight sessions. So the second-to-last and the last, 7-8 and 8-8, if you like, on the web, 7-8 and 8-8. I address in them, as I'm going to do today, a moment in the history of philosophy about which I told you at the time that when you're lost — that's why I'm telling you this, if you were attentive you have a way to reassure yourselves — you refer to Plato's myth of the cave, because the whole program is there.
2:58 I didn't say Plato said everything, far from it. That would even go against fundamental elements of my own philosophical position, to deny that there has been progress in 2000 years. On the other hand, the whole progression is already there, in the myth of the cave. The last time we saw each other was a day and a half before the last presidential ballot. That makes you laugh, you're lucky.
3:29 That's the best reaction, I agree. So I had conceded — because I didn't want to talk about it, first because it's not very nice, I don't flatter myself that I have any influence on people's votes, but anyway, I mean, I didn't feel I had the right, so close to the deadline, to exert the slightest pressure in one direction or another. And so I got out of it by telling you, I'm going to talk about it without talking about it.
4:02 And so I gave a brief summary of a few fundamental aporias of what is conventionally called political philosophy. And to show how far this is from marginal in our discussions, I come back to the myth of the cave. I lingered on Plato last time, that's why I'm referring to it again. I'm going to take a first — not a digression — a first pause. It won't look like a digression, don't worry. I'm going to say a bit more lightly what I've just said.
4:32 I'm thinking of a friend I lost for health reasons, René Comer, for those who knew him and who read the book, the biography of Clouscard written by François Négroni with Clouscard, in which René Comer is mentioned. We sometimes had the idea — it's a joke among jazz enthusiasts — of holding an enormous banquet. I think of Plato. A banquet where all our buddies would be. Well, the whole problem — he was a restaurant owner, you should know, so tables, he knows about them. And the problem was pairing the tables.
5:02 With whom? Well, there was a very big table, of course, with Plato at one end and Hegel at the other. And then the problem was the small tables. Who to put with whom? Who to put with Mozart. We finally found Kafka. That was the best, because the two of them, both so delicate, together, it was perfect. And then, who to put with Racine. Can you imagine? You can't put someone — you can't put someone vulgar. You can't put, you see.
5:34 And me, even I have a plebeian side. I can't sit next to Racine, all the same. Plus I have a fanboy side. I would have been such an admirer. He would have found me insufferable. And we found Duke Ellington. Do you know him? Someone with class. Duke Ellington is the only aristocrat we found. Right? An African American. Well, there you go. Plato and Hegel were at the two ends of the table, you see. I close the little playful parenthesis.
The Seventh Letter and Plato as inventor of dialogue 6:07 This is not by chance. It's still tied to Plato. What are we saying here? That Plato begins with the political. I won't go back over it — I developed it enough last time. It's a political trauma that lies at the origin of Plato's philosophical career. This is related in the Seventh Letter, which I alluded to last time, so I won't come back to it. Except, all the same, to recall how extremely rare it is for a correspondence to reach us after 20 centuries. Fortunately Plato's renown was already such at the time that there were a great many copies.
6:42 There were no photocopiers yet. I'm going too far back. There wasn't even the internet yet, or databases. So for it to have reached us, there must have been copies made. So we have a correspondence — part of it. We've preserved part of Plato's correspondence. About ten letters. And it's the Seventh Letter — if you consult the archives — his seventh letter, where he gives something of a history of all his adventures, especially his political misadventures.
7:12 Very briefly, he was called in as a philosopher-advisor, a consultant, to Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse. That just means king. And he advised him so well, so very platonically, that the other, after having summoned him, enslaved him. Because he had become a troublemaker for Plato — sorry, Plato had become a troublemaker for him. He kept saying, don't do this, don't do that. And there you go. Since Plato came from an aristocratic family, he was ransomed by friends, etc.
7:44 And it's following this trauma that he returned to Athens and opened, by buying the garden of Academos, he opened his school of philosophy. And so, very quickly — I don't want to dwell on it more than last time — he sums it up by saying, in this letter, that famous formula I've often repeated to you: 'While my eyes remained fixed on politics, I found myself, as it were, compelled to turn toward philosophy.' There you go. So I'm not inventing anything, I'm not offering an interpretation. I'm not reading between the lines, I'm quoting Plato to say that there is a political trauma at the origin of the mediation, the great detour, to use his own word, that Plato's philosophy represents.
8:23 In his work and in his dialogues. So, the philosophical corpus — since before him we don't have a corpus, we have the pre-Socratics, we have fragments reported by one or another, by Aristotle, very little material. That's why people like Heidegger talk only about them, because you can't just say whatever you want with something like that. It's like Nostradamus. I'm exaggerating a bit — not about Heidegger, but about the pre-Socratics. Well, there's Diels, the German scholar, who produced a remarkable critical edition of everything that has come down to us from the pre-Socratics.
9:00 And then we have the most exhaustive collection — also said to be one of the least reliable — that magnificent compilation made by Diogenes Laërtius, from the Roman era, which you can find in the Garnier-Flammarion edition called Les penseurs grecs avant Socrate [The Greek Thinkers before Socrates], if you want information on everything written with philosophical resonance — since we're pre-Socratic, we're not really yet in philosophy. Proof of this, moreover, is that most of them were called, at the time, physicists.
9:31 Thales, Pythagoras, they were called physicists. Even when, like Pythagoras, they were more mathematicians, there was already the same problem as between you two, between Thomas and you, between mathematicians and physicists. No, I know you only have solutions, it's fine. And so we don't know very much, because even the whole of what was published by Diogenes Laërtius amounts to what — a small volume like this one in Garnier-Flammarion?
10:01 And on top of that, it's hearsay. In the chapter on Pythagoras, Diogenes Laërtius recounts at one point that, arriving at the stadium, he made a movement with his toga and people saw he had a golden thigh, Pythagoras did. Not everything is on the same level, you see, it's a compilation. There are very interesting things. And one thing I'll dwell on a little is precisely about Plato. Even if it doesn't seem to directly concern the political — but who knows what isn't political in Plato?
10:32 Diogenes Laërtius — well, I just caricatured him a bit, or rather, recalled that there's a mix of good and bad in everything he reports. But where he is irreplaceable is that, first of all, Plato gets one of the longest chapters in his compilation, and he talks about him as a moment in the evolution of literary genres. It's really extraordinary. He talks about how the evolution of dramatic poetry took place.
11:03 He goes back to the origin — this isn't in Plato — to the dithyramb of Dionysus; those who know Nietzsche know all this, and there are other sources too, at the origin of tragedy there is the cult of Dionysus, the dithyramb. At the origin, it was very primitive, there was just the chorus, and then a respondent, a sacrificer, a priest. The first characters of tragedy, that's it. You already have the structure of theater — the crowd, one might say the tribe, elsewhere — watching the sacrificer; the first characters of dramatic art are the sacrificer and his victim.
11:35 The blood that flowed is at the good origin of tragedy. Moreover, some of you must know that the word tragedy itself, by etymology, comes from the word goat — the sacrifice of the goat, tragedia, is the scapegoat. That's the origin, I won't dwell on it. Afterward, Thespis, I quote Diogenes Laërtius, 'brought in a reciter,' right? Plato, yes — he brought Plato into the history of theater.
12:07 Plato invented dialogue — dialogue comes to take over from a literary genre. There, I close my parenthesis on this very strange and very interesting account by Diogenes Laërtius, which reminds us that Plato was already regarded as an artist of thought. He is the one who deepened dramatic art by creating dialogue. Independent of the philosophical interest, to which I now return. So you see the relation between philosophy and politics. Politics frames philosophy at both ends.
Drawing of the cave and the cascade of model and copy 12:39 By the origin and by the end. And it's regarding the end that I'm going to speak again about the myth of the cave, which has the advantage of being a representation. Already, as a myth, mythos is not logos, right? Mythos is a bit less abstract than logos. And so it can be represented. I've never had so many gifts.
13:12 There we go, there we go, that's it — let's get up and do the sea. So, you remember, there's a cliff like this by the sea, we're in Greece. I'm a very bad drawer. I don't dare bring someone up to the board to do it instead of me. So, here, I'll make it sloping like this... Is that too pale? Is it too pale, is that it? Yes, yes, let's do it in red, something like that. Yes, but that, yes.
13:44 Is it better now? There we go. So, can we see the sea? Good. So, we're in Greece, we're by the sea. It's not always this rough, all right, hm? Good. So, this here, is a cave.
14:14 This is a wall that divides the cave into two parts lengthwise, right? There. To the right of the wall, there's — so — you and me. It's us the prisoners resemble, he says. So Plato tells us they're chained, shackled, chained, whatever you want to call it, in such a way — this is what you need to remember — that they cannot look behind them, nor even to the left or right, but only in front of them.
14:51 And so they can only see, of course, the back of the cave, right? Here, you see? Can you see it? So, and on the other side of the wall, invisible to us, to the prisoners, strange figures pass along this wall carrying on their heads a simulacrum of everything one can see around us, right?
15:24 So, since I'm a bad drawer, I'll draw one carrying a flower on its head, for example, see? There, a four-leaf clover, a flower, whatever you like, right? Another one carrying a bird, right? As if it were a bird. There — and of course, at the entrance — sorry, at the entrance of the cave, here, there's a fire that projects the shadows of this thing onto the back of the cave. He invented the camera obscura, the dark chamber, and cinema, Plato, really, look — a projection coming from behind, it's extraordinary, isn't it?
16:05 Corneille, in the 17th century, will pick this up again in L'Illusion comique, right? Yes, these are interesting stories, aren't they? 'As for me,' says the turkey in a cavernous voice, in Corneille — and then, above the sea, we're in Greece, listen, oh dear, I'm not going to make it brown, that wouldn't do, this... 'noble and brilliant, offspring of an illustrious family, thou of whom my mother dared to boast herself the daughter, thou perhaps didst blush at the trouble thou seest me in, O sun, I come to see thee for the last time' — so, there, we have the elements in place, you see, a whole cascade of the model-copy couple: the fire is already a copy, a simulacrum of the solar fire, of the first source, especially in the kingdom of Apollo, we're in Greece, and the shadows, mind you, are but a pale reflection sent by the fire, which itself is only a relay of the sun. The model-copy relation, as you know, plays a fundamental role in Platonic thought, since it divides the senses, appearance, the sensible world, which is only the reflection, the copy of the intelligible world — these are thoughts that must not be confined
Baudelaire's Platonism 17:15 to their period — the revolution that inaugurates poetic modernity for us, which we attribute to Baudelaire — I speak in a schoolbook way, I mean, as Rimbaud puts it — Rimbaud knows a thing or two about modernity — he says of Baudelaire: 'first seer, king of poets, a true god' — quite something! — 'but the form so praised in him is petty; he lived in too artistic a milieu.' Now Baudelaire has a poetics, that is, a philosophy of poetry, a theory of poetry, a voiceover commentary on his own poetry that is fabulously Platonic.
17:49 To illustrate it, well, there are plenty of poems that illustrate it in Les Fleurs du mal, if only 'Correspondances,' which you know, it's extremely well known — I'll still quote the most Platonic passage: 'Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let out confused words; man passes through forests of symbols' — he, Baudelaire, knows what the prisoners don't know: that this is a sham, that this isn't true reality, that it's only its symbolization, its evocation, by analogy, of what lies behind.
18:21 'Man passes through forests of symbols which observe him' — watch out, o-b-s-e-r-v-e-n-t, symbols which observe him. Note, there's a stop here. You see, usually it's man who looks at the symbols; here, it's the symbols that observe man. And what's more, they observe him 'with familiar looks.' Symbols are strange to man. The Sphinx is strange to those to whom it poses riddles. But man is familiar to the symbols.
18:53 That's interesting. So, I repeat: 'Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let out confused words; man passes through forests of symbols which observe him with familiar looks. Like long echoes that merge from afar in a shadowy and profound unity, vast as night and as clarity, perfumes, colors, and sounds answer one another.' 'In a shadowy and profound unity' — above all, this is typical of his, he has plenty like this throughout Les Fleurs du mal. But the most Platonic thing, as a voiceover — because here it's not his voiceover, it's his poetry.
19:24 In his poetics — it's a text I recommend to you, I think I've quoted it only once in four years. It's the introduction he wrote — you know he made an admirable translation, for someone who was bad at English like him, of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. He introduced him to France. He wasn't the first to speak of him — the first was Nerval, but no one ever mentions that. In a little text that went unnoticed at the time, called Les Nuits d'octobre. As always with Nerval, he makes a small passing allusion, regarding realism. But it's Baudelaire who pounds the table and says people must know this man, and who will become the mastermind — Edgar Poe — of the whole school that will follow, of Mallarmé, the guiding thinker.
20:03 The guiding thinker, theorist, almost the ideologue, apart from his own work properly poetic or literary, was Edgar Poe to him. And so he translated the essential part of the corpus: the Extraordinary Tales, then the sequel, the New Extraordinary Tales, and then the Grotesque and Serious Tales. With all three you have almost the whole of Poe's prose, apart from a few essays, including a cosmological essay called Eureka. I mention it in passing — it contains interesting considerations on the continuous and the discontinuous in matter.
20:38 I'll get back to reading. And then there are these admirable poems, which have nothing to do with the tales, which don't at all have the somewhat macabre side, sometimes the somewhat, how would you say, gothic side. The tales are very gothic. And these poems are much more seraphic. Anyway, that's not my subject. What I'm concerned with is the middle one, the New Extraordinary Tales, in the introduction, a long preface that Baudelaire devotes to it. And this preface is called 'New Notes'
21:09 in the plural, 'New Notes on Edgar Poe.' That's the text I recommend to you. It exists on Wikisource. So I'll extract this passage: 'It is that admirable, that immortal instinct for beauty which makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, as a correspondence, of heaven. It is both through poetry and by means of poetry, through music and by means of music, that the soul glimpses the splendors situated beyond the grave.'
21:42 You see, 'as a glimpse, a correspondence of heaven.' Right after, Baudelaire — Mallarmé will speak of 'the prior heaven where beauty blooms.' You see, it's the same school, all of this — to show that Platonism runs through the centuries at that level. There you go. But I'm not here to do a bit of neo-Platonism, with the murky side of that aesthetic neo-Platonism that irritated Hegel because the German Romantics were so fond of it. That's not what's at stake here. What's at stake here, on the contrary.
From doxa to dianoia 22:13 What I'm doing here is reminding you of what we saw in our long development, especially in the year 2014-2015, on what is conventionally called, in philosophy, the first great section of the program: so-called philosophy of knowledge. The whole part of philosophy that tries to answer the question 'what can I know,' as opposed to the second, which answers the question 'what must I do?' Which has nothing to do with it. It's not about values. It's about knowing what is, not what ought to be. I'll talk about the banana.
22:45 To make clear the opposition between being and duty-to-be, the duty of the banana is to be in my belly. That's its duty-to-be for the monkey. Whereas for the botanist, who has a cognitive aim, and not an interested one, it's to know whether there's carbon, anhydride, I don't know. COH? I won't commit myself, but there must be COH in the banana anyway. There you go. What is, not what ought to be.
23:15 In short, in this whole great journey of knowledge, I recalled, not so long ago in fact, that Plato inaugurates almost the entire set of philosophical systems that will parade by until now, even through their contradictions and disagreements, in that they are almost always tripartite. In Descartes, for example, the tree of philosophy: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics in the broad sense, which includes chemistry and biology, and the branches, the leaves, the final stage, are medicine and morality, the ultimate implication of what metaphysics and physics bring us.
23:51 Instructed by the theoretical detour, metaphysics and physics, one can finally move to action in morality and medicine. Three parts. Kant: sensibility, understanding, reason. Spinoza: knowledge of the first kind, the second kind, the third kind. Hegel: the logos, nature, spirit. Well, that starts here. Because, I remind you, especially for those who've never heard of it, that at the back of the cave a parallelism begins that we'll follow all the way to the sun.
24:31 There is a parallelism between the objects of knowledge and the kind of knowledge that corresponds to them. What objects are there at the back here? Shadows, simulacra—that's the zero degree, not the lowest degree of knowledge, the falsest, since we already have that. It's what this inferior mode of knowledge corresponds to: doxa, in Greek, opinion. There, opinion. It's not knowledge, not an epistēmē, it's only an opinion. It seems to me that this rumbling in the distance is a truck, no it's a plane, no it's thunder.
25:02 at the foot. And of course, in Platonic terms, it's the whole of what he calls the kosmos aisthētos, the sensible world. That is, don't try to read between the lines, it's clear: the world that is the object of our senses, that's what sensible means, that which can only be perceived by the senses, and to which doxa corresponds.
25:34 So, you see, we're going to make this journey that goes from here to here. So, here I put doxa. As soon as we've crossed the wall there, then yes, all the same, how is that possible since there are chains? From time to time, he says, a prisoner can be forced to free himself from his bonds, and that's why I made the slope there. It's to respect the text, it's not because I'm a bad draughtsman and I went down—I tried to make a slope. Because Plato insists with great humor and great force on the fact that the slope is hard and that the prisoner who wants to climb back up will have sore knees because the ground is rough, and he'll balk, he'll want to go back to his previous position; he'll have to be forced to turn away from the shadows and look toward the light.
26:21 First because it's rough and the slope is difficult, and second because he's dazzled. He'll think he saw better when there was no light. He says all that—I'm not inventing anything. Read it, read it. It's the beginning of the seventh book of the Republic. You have all that on the wiki. Don't skip the end of the sixth. I've often quoted it, it's perhaps the most profound passage in Plato, practically, where he speaks of the idea of the good, and it's after speaking of it that he illustrates it with the sun here.
26:53 That's to tell you that the cave comes as a reward for the great effort made during the first six books of the Republic. So the cave is presented right at the start of the seventh book. I remind you that the Republic has ten in all. We say "books," I've said it before, I repeat it, they're actually chapters. Don't be discouraged, don't think there are ten volumes to slog through. There you go. Even though a legend has it that Plato reworked each of the books of the Republic seven times. Hegel likes to quote this against those who think intuition will let us grasp the absolute like a pistol shot, as he says.
27:26 It even takes time, work, patience. So, the Anstrengung des Begriffs, as they say in German, the strenuous effort of the concept. So, there you go, the prisoner rebels, but once he's crossed the little wall and moved from the copies to the model, he's gone from doxa to dianoia, with a diaeresis. There, that's supposed to be a die.
27:58 There. Dianoia, well as soon as there's "dia," that's "per" in French, perception, or "dia" also, diagonal. It's everything that's across, everything that's by way of an intermediary. Yes, because there we had immediate knowledge. Fine, it's false, it's rubbish, but it's immediate—it at least has that merit. It does without an intermediary. Whereas here, this is what's historically called, in the history of thought, discursive knowledge.
28:29 You see, as soon as there's "dis," "des," the one splits into two. Dis-, dispute, digression, disorder, destruction—all these words have the same prefix, because for there to be a conflict, you need at least two. At least, right? And there, it's no longer immediate knowledge, it's mediate knowledge. Why? Because we know by way of an intermediary. For example, right now, between us here, there's language, you see?
29:01 There's reasoning, there's thought. If... then, that's it. Discursive knowledge is if-then. The perfect model, of course, is embodied by mathematics. You have to start with first propositions, demands, as they said in Euclid's time—I've often repeated this—and it's from these axioms, definitions, postulates, that theorems can be deduced afterward, and progress made. It's a knowledge that's much more—it has no relation with the other.
Dialectic, theoria and the Grail 29:34 There, we're starting to be in truth, but it's discursive knowledge. We're no longer in immediacy, we're in mediation. That's why we can't stop there, for Plato. And why? Well, he says it at the end of the sixth book, that's why I tell you to read the end of the sixth first, which gives a bit of the instructions for the seventh, for the cave, for the myth. "Notice that geometers"—don't forget he had put at the entrance of his school "let none enter here who is not a geometer," I remind you that means that geometry, that is, the mathematics of the time, among the Greeks, is essentially geometry.
30:10 Essentially, not only. Euclid really did develop arithmetic. But this means, this inscription at the entrance of his school, that it's the best training for contemplating realities that cannot be seen but only conceived—concept. Mathematics is useful for that, but that doesn't mean we're going to do mathematics. It means you have to have done it. So we are mediocre philosophers because since mathematics and the sciences have reached a degree of specialization that was unthinkable in Plato's time, and even in the time of a Pascal or a Descartes or a Leibniz, who could still, in their day, be the greatest philosopher, the greatest mathematician, the greatest jurist, the greatest theologian of their time—we can no longer do that now.
30:51 As Bachelard used to say—who knew about both philosophy and science—just chemistry alone couldn't be contained in a single library today, there are so many books, just chemistry alone, you see. So, we are mediocre philosophers since we don't have the mathematical knowledge that Plato said should be the propaedeutic to philosophy worthy of the name. But why don't they settle for that? And that's where there's this famous phrase: "Notice"—because it's a dialogue—"that geometers proceed from hypotheses toward a conclusion, that's what we just said, if-then, instead—sorry—without ever going back up from the hypotheses to the unhypothesized principle."
31:35 What will soon be called metaphysics is wanting to ground all that on a first anchor point, and not on a series of definitions that we're obliged to admit as such, because we have to start somewhere. The dream of an absolute beginning. And so there's a third term beyond that, here, which is called—I'll do it in... Yes, I'll continue in red since—which is called here, dialectic. Dialogos. There must be at least two discourses facing each other.
32:07 Plato gives a beautiful image, he says for the spark to fly, the two stones must be struck against each other. Neither stone taken separately can give the spark of truth. It can only come from dialogos—sorry, dialectic. There. We're at the opposite of Deleuze, who speaks of "infamous dialectic." One had to be anti-Marxist at that time. Now the job's done, so we don't talk about it anymore. The war should be over, apparently.
32:37 So, there you go. And then, you say to me, ah well, you're forgetting the main stage, all the same. Ah yes? No, but there, there's no more philosophy. There's no more discourse. Of course, all of that is the key to everything we've seen up to now. It's the source. But there's no more discourse. It's a silence, and it's the moment Plato calls theoria, which means in Greek contemplation. So, we no longer speak. Right? Theoria, you have the original meaning of theory.
33:08 Right? Theoria, contemplation. And, moreover, the word intuition originally isn't my grandmother sensing things about animals, no, that's not it. Intuition originally is seeing, is touching, it's everything that's somewhat immediate, it comes indeed from the supine intueri of that verb, theoria. So, intueri. Arriving here, then, is the end of the whole quest.
33:43 It's the Grail, in the region of the Grail. You know that the Grail's chief property is to radiate. In whatever versions we have of it, in the Arthurian romances, it radiates, and its light is even dazzling. Have any of you had the curiosity to read the Story of the Grail? Yes? Good, Chrétien de Troyes's version, he's the first to speak of it. After that, there were lots of copies. From his own time, everyone wanted to finish it, because he leaves it mysteriously unfinished, the quest for the Grail.
34:14 It could only remain unfinished, right? It ends unfinished on Perceval. Afterward, there are continuations where it has to be Perceval's son, Galahad, but in Chrétien de Troyes's version, he's the first to speak of it. He's the first to use the word Grail. There have been thousands of pages—I used to be a specialist, I'll move on now—up to today, to find out where he draws this story from, where he draws this word from. We still don't know today. There are plenty of hypotheses, no shortage of those. Some even say we have to go back to Arabic, that it came from the Crusades. You see, from the East, so to speak; others say it's linked to "graillon," Graal, Graal.
34:48 Yes, yes, yes. "Grailler," that is, in slang, to say we're going to eat, "grailler." The grill, yes, because the Grail—and I come back to Plato—the Grail nourishes. Originally, it's what allows communion. The host, the host, we swallow it, no? In the version, in the Christian retelling—which is not the case with Chrétien de Troyes, but in the Christian retelling made by Robert de Boron in the thirteenth century—the Grail becomes the vessel that collected Christ's blood, right?
35:19 The Catholic Church understood that, faced with the success of such a mythology of apparently Celtic origin—even though we find almost the same irradiation of the absolute everywhere, the black stone in pre-Islamic Arab tradition, that relates a bit to this same story, black sun—now, I've often quoted this passage, three times often, the passage from Book VI, I come back to it, of the Republic, I can't repeat it enough that you must read the end of Book VI, say the last two pages of Book VI before tackling the myth of the cave, or after he's said that the good cannot be spoken of because it's beyond all ousia, it's not like the other ideas, like the idea of beauty, the idea of table, the idea of glasses, the idea of man, the idea of beauty—it's not just a model for everything that is beautiful, for every empirical pair of glasses, so that all the glasses in the world participate in the idea of glasses, which are neither made of tortoiseshell nor metal, it's the idea of glasses.
The idea of the good, beyond essence 36:32 I'm serious, Plato says there's even an idea of hair, of mud, and of filth, in the Parmenides. You see, there's an idea for everything, for everything that has a name, in fact, a name in the grammatical sense, a common noun. Well, that's scholastic Platonism, I won't dwell on it, it's what's called the vertical relation of ideas to things. The ideas are up above in the heaven of ideas, and below, it's vertical, there's the idea of beauty, and then below, there's, I don't know, your favorite actresses, your favorite actors, as you like. The Parthenon, Notre-Dame de Paris, whatever you like.
37:03 It's inexhaustible. That's vertical participation, but there's the more mysterious, horizontal participation. That there be a common point among all beautiful objects, even if it's as different as a sunset and Brigitte Bardot—we get used to it. We do feel we have somewhat the same feeling of beauty, even if, frankly, visually, one would have to detail things to know what's common. But—I'll stay just with the visual—if there's a common point between the idea of glasses and the idea of an alarm clock, and the idea of beauty and the idea of sky, of earth, then there's a horizontal circulation of ideas for Plato.
37:47 Something circulates among the ideas. That's why the Platonic system isn't a pyramid. I dwell on this because the consequences are important. It's not a pyramid like in Aristotle, where you start all the way at the bottom with formless matter and end with matter-less form. Thirty years at the Academy, at Plato's school. For the word "form," he uses the word eidos, which is the same word translated as "idea" in Plato. In Plato, to take up my metaphor again, it's not a single isolated summit like that.
38:20 You know Mont Ventoux in Provence. It's curious because it's detached from the Alps, it stands alone, over 2000 meters, it's magnificent. Plato is a Himalaya. There are plenty of summits. There are as many summits as there are ideas. You see, it's a whole massif. But what links them together? The idea of the good. And since Plato doesn't want to speak of it because it's beyond discourse, he says, I can speak to you with great humor of its offspring. There you go, just as here, the shadow of the tree is an offspring of the idea of the tree passing through there.
38:54 I mean, the sun is the equivalent, in what we see around us, in the kosmos aisthētos, in the sensible world, since we see it, of what the good is in the merely intelligible order. Up to here, I've roughly summarized what we know of Plato, even though already horizontal participation is more mysterious. I'll come back to it in two minutes. But the chapter doesn't stop there, or rather the paragraph doesn't stop there. He takes one more step forward, saying, after having astonished his two interlocutors Adeimantus and Glaucon, who say, but you're saying it's almost beyond being.
39:30 Essence is eidos, it's the same word as idea and form. You know, to be beyond essence in Plato—Platonism is said to be a philosophy of essence, of idea. So you see, if the good is beyond essence, imagine the level of eminence that can take on in Plato. His interlocutors are stunned. He says, yes, yes, Socrates answers, it surpasses essence in splendor and radiance. And, tell us about it—that's where he says, I can't, you're asking too much of me, I want to speak to you of its offspring.
40:00 And his interlocutors say to him—you can see Plato's humor—tell us about the offspring, but another time you'll owe us the story of the father. So, that's where he adds, you'll notice that just as the sun is a third term that allows the object to be seen—the sun, the light—to the object, to be seen, and to the eye, to see, for without this third term which is light, even a healthy eye would see nothing and the object would not be seen. So it's this third term, light, here the sun, that allows the subject to know, you see, and the eye to see and the object to be seen.
40:38 Well, what allows the soul now, and no longer just the eye, the eye of the soul, to know—understood, the intelligible world—and the intelligible world to be known by the soul, this third term, that's what must be called the good. But it's not finished, that's where the three most mysterious lines arrive. "Notice that just as the sun not only ensures vision for the subject and visibility for the object, it also gives beings growth and nourishment."
41:13 That's much more mysterious because there, we're no longer in the order of knowledge and the cognitive. Right? We're in the order of vitality and of what gives life, and even growth. Growth and nourishment. There, everything happens as if this theoria were not merely a somewhat cold, somewhat theoretical outward contemplation. I don't know—like Faust looking at the landscape in Goethe's Faust, saying what a magnificent spectacle, but alas, only a spectacle—where might I grasp you, infinite nature?
41:43 You see? In vision, there's always something a bit distancing compared to music, which is much more inward. That's why we see people possessed by music. We rarely see people in trances in museums. It can happen. Apparently some people cry in front of paintings. I admire that, it's good. But it's still rare. Whereas in music, trance is frequent, it's important. One is also possessed by music. And growth and nourishment.
42:14 As if it weren't a vision in the sense that I see the tree over there, but at the same time like a suction. Our relation, right, of the soul that has climbed all that, not limply, but toward the good. There. I make this reminder. You might say, hey, you set out to say that it begins with politics, it started with politics, and now we're far from that, we're in mysticism. Wait.
From knowledge to action: the return into the cave 42:44 Because everyone stops there for Plato, whereas we've only gone halfway. If you read the seventh book, you'll see it's only half. That's the philosophy of knowledge. But philosophy isn't enough when you work on it, energetically. That's fine at the Sorbonne or at Censier or wherever you like, but not at the CNRS. Because it doesn't only have a cognitive aim, you know, I repeat myself, it's not only that it can know what one ought to do. The true and the false, that's a problem we share with scientists, even if we don't base it on the same objects, but there's also a question of values.
43:16 There's good and evil, or just and unjust. And that, I'll never stop repeating, one can be a very great physicist, even like Irwane, and be a scoundrel. I'm not saying you're a scoundrel, Irwane. I mean, if Irwane is a decent guy, it's not necessarily physics that's responsible for it. I'm speaking of a collective Irwane. It's not the quantity of knowledge I have that enlightens me morally. Should I put my grandmother, who has an illness, out of her misery? It's not my skills as a physicist, a biologist, etc., that will inform me better at that level.
43:51 I can only question myself. I have to take advice from people I consider wise, not learned. You see, it's not the same thing. We see it there. Disjunction. So, even granting that we've finished here, we can grant that to Plato, let's grant that everything there is to know is finished here, now we have to move on to the philosophy of action. Watch out there. Now we have to do that. That is, go back and tell the person, everything you see there is nonsense. It's baloney.
44:26 It has to stop. That's not where it's happening. And that's the political. That's how it ends, Plato. It begins with a political trauma, Plato's philosophical career, with a failure. And it ends with a hypothetical redemption of the community of the cave, such that it be freed from the chains of illusion, error, falsehood, etc.
44:57 It's important to see that there's no individual salvation in Plato. Aristotle, who stayed thirty years at his school and who has plenty of disagreements with Plato, nonetheless agrees, being a good Athenian like Plato, that man is zoon politikon. Man is a social animal. It shouldn't be translated as a "political-scheming" animal. He's an animal for whom, unlike other animal species, social life is essential and not merely accidental. It's not that men happen to live in society, it's that we don't know of any attribution of the epithet "human" to beings who did not appear within a social framework.
45:37 At whatever level, even at a Neanderthal level, we find burial remains, whatever you like, things that prove there's a collective ritual, and it's only at that moment, precisely when it's a burial ritual, that we say, well, that can't be cynopithecines. Well, yes. There you go. So, except in the imagination, in Hollywood—they didn't invent the elephant graveyard. Maybe it's true, who knows.
46:07 Well, we only know this story from Hollywood. As an old African myself, I didn't quite hear it that way in Africa. So, as for this return, read the passage in the Republic that relates to it. You'll see that it's violent. Let me come back to current events. You were right to laugh earlier, but at the same time, you see, it's not a game. It's not a game because the return, just as - and now I go back to the letter of the text - Plato insists on all the trouble that overwhelms the prisoner when he's forced to free himself of his chains and climb that rough path, as he says, which leads to the exit of the cave, in the same way, he's going to suffer when he comes back, for the opposite reasons.
46:57 Just as it was the light that dazzled him, now he sees nothing in the shadows because his eyes have gotten used to the light. I forgot to tell you that one shouldn't go there all at once. I'll come back to that in a moment. Plato does say that one has to proceed gradually. One has to train oneself to look, that's why I mentioned the sea, the reflections of the sun on the water, before looking at the sun itself. Otherwise - there's a very nice poem by Nerval, not 'La Force des Chimères,' but an early poem called 'The Black Spot,' I believe.
47:29 If I lose my Nerval, I'll really be in trouble. He speaks of the black spots we all get in our eyes when we look at the sun a bit too long, you know, and afterward there's a black spot that settles over everything. He's not yet the great poet who will speak of 'the black sun of melancholy,' but you see, like someone who imprudently, like another madman, Hölderlin, who says 'Apollo struck me.' You have to be careful with the Good, with the notion of total knowledge. You don't go there just like that. It's not all immediate.
48:01 You need mediations, intermediaries, the last one being the reflections in the water. All of this is in the text, I'm not inventing anything. So, after having trained himself, he has understood the light so well that now it's the darkness that bothers him, so he wavers, he stumbles. And so the crowd mocks him. 'Fine job going down there if it's just to come back like a drunkard,' etc. And what's more, not only does he waver and stumble, but he tells them they shouldn't stay there, that they need to change their lives. If they could get hold of him, they would seize him and kill him, wouldn't they?
48:32 'Yes,' he says, Adeimantus - well, yes, Adeimantus, Socrates's interlocutor. 'Yes,' he says. In short, this recalls the Socratic story somewhat, doesn't it? But here it functions as a metonymy, if you will, a way of generalizing to the whole journey, not only of knowledge, but of philosophy taken as a whole. For as Plato says in the text, it is with one's whole soul that one must go toward philosophy. Not only with one's understanding - with the whole soul. So, I'm insisting on this: when I tell you that everything is there, I haven't said that Plato said everything.
The slave of the Meno against slavery by nature 49:04 And I'm sure I would have had plenty of political disagreements with Plato, who remains after all a man of the fourth century BC, less of a slaveholder than Aristotle. He's even one of the rare ones who emancipates the slave. In the Republic, there is no slave. And the most famous slave in the whole of Plato's work, for those who know - which dialogue is it where a slave plays an important role? Bravo. Who said the Meno? Bravo. Yes, the Meno. The Meno, where Plato illustrates his mysterious claim that all knowledge is recollection. When his interlocutor is puzzled, he says, 'You'll see, call the slave for me.'
49:42 'Bring the slave here, he comes from the countryside.' And he addresses questions to him, he says, 'Now, you did have this square, didn't you?' 'Yes,' says the slave. 'And this diagonal, you had this too?' 'Yes.' And through skillfully posed questions, he gets the slave to find the formula that allows one to calculate the diagonal in relation to the square - Pythagoras. You see, he already had it in his soul. It wasn't me who told him; I merely asked him questions. I played the role of the maia, the midwife - that's the Greek word, hence maieutics, you know, Socrates's method, which consists in saying: I don't take a piece of knowledge from my own head and arbitrarily deposit it in someone else's head, I help him give birth to a knowledge he has within him but which, like all of us at the outset, he has forgotten.
50:24 All knowledge is recollection. We have forgotten our primal sojourn - I repeat Mallarmé - in that former heaven where beauty flourished. There. So let's leave these mysteries aside. What we need to retain from all this, for now, is that there is no slave and that the slave of the Meno plays a fundamental role. It shows that the slave is like us. If questioned properly, there is none of that racism which claims that some races are made for knowledge and others made to obey and work.
50:58 Rousseau, in the Social Contract - you know that the whole first part of the Social Contract consists in saying that the right of the strongest is not just immoral, that this isn't just moralizing on Rousseau's part - that's why this book is explosive - but that it doesn't hold up, meaning that history could not have happened that way. The strongest is never strong enough to remain master forever unless he converts his strength into right and obedience into duty. If there are slaves by nature, it's because there were slaves against nature.
51:29 'Force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them.' These are quotes from the Social Contract. Why am I bringing this up? Because he cites Aristotle at the beginning. Aristotle says there are men born to command, others born to obey. There, we're in the realm of races, of the biological, which is - be wary of a certain use of cognitive sciences. I'm not judging cognitive sciences, how could I? Especially since one would need multiple competencies to judge them.
52:03 But on the other hand, their ideological use is terrifying. Even Lordon - yes, why are you laughing? It's true, I discussed it with him, at Tropiques. Even Lordon, who spends his whole time using a certain Spinoza, a 'Lordon-style' Spinoza, cold-war style as I call it, to say that there's no freedom, that everything is determined - even he says, be wary, there are the cognitive sciences. Their determinism is even worse than mine.
52:33 Yes, even Lordon. He has a scientific training that I don't have. It's on the website. You can find these talks in the seeds of the Paretropiques, and I think it's still there - it goes back three years. I cited Aristotle on purpose to show the audacity of Plato, for his time, in emancipating the slave. On this level, to show that a slave - there's no difference. What matters for Plato is functions: the guardians of the city, the nurses.
53:09 I say this to lighten things up a bit, but Hegel mocks Plato for saying that nurses should run back and forth with the newborn in their arms so that the children don't get too accustomed to comfort, so that they become good warriors. Plato could have spared himself the recommendation to the nurses. Political philosophy ought to concern itself with something other than this kind of detail. Alright. 'If he could get hold of him, he would kill him.' That's violent.
Plato hostile to change, truth to be shared 53:40 I'm trying to reassure you about the detours we've had to take. We've had some mishaps due to logistical elements - I won't even say due to contingencies of all sorts. But beyond that, it's inherent to philosophy that we spend our time going back and forth. Agreed? Why would I draw closer to a truth if that truth were fatal to me? So I refer you to that 7-8 and 8-8. I gave you the references earlier.
54:10 May-June 2016, for the videos, to be precise - where I develop this, though I don't want to go back over it too much either. I told you I wouldn't stand still, nor go backwards. But where I develop the fact that - and this is why I'd have political disagreements with Plato, let me pick up my thread again - Plato had one single obsession: that the city should not be modified, should not transform, that there should be no change. He is not at all progressive on this point. For him, time can only move in a bad direction, toward decline. Right? Time is what goes from youth toward old age, toward decline, toward decadence.
54:45 For example, he prescribes in the Republic that no citizen should leave before the age of fifty, I believe - something like that, you see? In case they'd go to Egypt or wherever and pick up foreign habits - no, they mustn't go - and bring them back into the city. 'Oh, what a mess, that's not acceptable.' You see to what extent he guarantees that there be no alteration of the city once it's established. He's the first one to want to change it - Plato is a revolutionary. But once it's been changed according to Plato's wishes, he's not going to start transforming it further. So right away, this leaves no room for what is a very modern notion, that of progress, which really only takes shape starting in the eighteenth century.
55:27 Look closely. Or rather, in passing - a notion which perhaps died with the counter-revolution of '68. I'm not speaking ill of June '68, of the doubling of the minimum wage and the recognition of union rights within companies. I'm talking about the May of Cohn-Bendit, because it shouldn't be confused with that of the CGT. Really. You've forgotten the May of Cohn-Bendit - it governs us. So, once again, I would have disagreements with Plato. But his immense merit is that nothing has changed up to today.
55:58 It's that politics frames philosophy both upstream and downstream, and that the resolution of all the problems of questioning cannot be done in a singular way - I mean by the isolated individual. Man rediscovers his essence as a zōon politikon. That's what matters. What's the use of keeping truth here if it can't be shared, if it isn't universal? And I pointed out to you - this is why I insist on it - that it's not only a knowledge that is to be shared.
56:30 There's also nourishment. Are we agreed on that? I cited Plato - the sun gives this growth and nourishment. I do say that you're young, you're big eaters, you have an appetite I'd love to have. But even so, you must notice that it's easier to eat when you're with good friends and all that, that you have more appetite than when you're all alone. You see? That's what I'm getting at.
57:00 In humans - a snake, it catches the rabbit, don't worry about that. I've seen it done, it's terrifyingly fast. Well, catching it, swallowing it, that's good. And digesting it is even better. You can do whatever you want with it. It's the first bite that counts. Let's not get sidetracked. So, I wanted to recall this to say that all the questions you might ask yourselves about part of the philosophy syllabus, of the whole history of philosophy, has its solution somewhere around there, at the level of how the problem is posed.
57:33 Immediate knowledge, intuition, discursive knowledge, the relation to the sciences, to epistēmē. Even today - I was discussing it yesterday, I believe, with Cugo - that somewhat unsatisfying side, somewhere, isn't there, of the purely technical-practical emancipation, if I may put it in Kantian terms, of modern man, which leaves a certain dissatisfaction. All of that is there somewhere. So I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read and reread the beginning of Book 7 of the Republic, starting from the end of Book 6.
58:09 just to be clear. So. I referred to this myth, as I told you, and I also left in what I somewhat pompously called: every philosopher tends to claim scientific knowledge he doesn't actually have. Firstly, one can't help it - even though I admitted earlier that given today's degree of specialization, the scientific knowledge one can possess when not in the field is derisory. Still, metaphorically, sometimes I say that I've left matrix-like elements in my teaching.
No pure origin: the always-already complex 58:44 Well, it's a bit of a show-off move, I know nothing about matrix calculus. But still, 'matrix' isn't a word that comes only from mathematics, so I have the right to use it. There are matrices in printing, there are matrices in sound recording - not so much anymore now, but that's mastering, that's what it was called, we used to say 'the matrix' among analog sound engineers, right, for the first album, which I'll get to. What I mean is that since our time together is limited relative to everything there would be to say - necessarily limited - I try to give you elements that provide a synoptic and somewhat circular view each time.
59:23 So there are recurring elements across the different workshops I've been doing since 2014, and I'm going to list a few, with the myth of the cave in the background. For instance - good grief, ah yes, there. When I started, for those who want to refer back to the very beginning, in 2014, in December 2014, the first video - unfortunately we don't have the very first one, it starts with the second.
59:55 I'll say 'unfortunately' for my own sake, I'd love to remember it - on the nature and origin of philosophy. What else would you talk about at the start, if not what philosophy consists in - nature in the sense of definition, a proposed definition, the essence proper to it, etc. - and origin: how could you know, how could you determine where a thing begins if you don't know what it consists of? Where does a river begin? At what point does the Amazon deserve to be called a river? I don't know. At a point where there are already many confluences - you've all been in the Alps, in what geographers call cones of reception - well, all of you, some of you - you know there's a spot where you arrive near a source, near the source, you've gone upstream, and at some point, up to then you were more or less following the course of the water, and then all of a sudden you no longer know, it goes off in all directions, there are little trickles of water running between your legs, right?
1:00:48 Is the Rhône, or the Rhine, or the Danube, or the Amazon, this one or that one give or take 20 cm - it's when they merge that it starts becoming serious, you see what I mean? There's no pure origin, it's a fantasy. In the abstract, one can say 'instant T-zero,' in a constructivist and arbitrary way, but in reality, there is just as little pure origin of a river - a river, I'm giving you the philosophical category I'm alluding to - as there is of the 'always-already complex.'
1:01:21 What we call the always-already complex, which has great importance in philosophical modernity. It means that from the very origin, it's complex. So it's not an origin in the sense of a simple, pure origin, because d'Alembert - who is, incidentally, a tremendous mathematician - but d'Alembert, who is undoubtedly the best popularizer of Enlightenment philosophy - if you want a summary of everything essential in Enlightenment philosophy, you won't find it in Voltaire, you won't find it in Rousseau, I mean a synthetic summary. What is the Enlightenment?
1:01:51 I would answer - it's a question Foucault poses in a famous work, a famous essay - I would answer with the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie by d'Alembert, which served as the preface to that admirable collective work, the Encyclopédie, with its illustrations, its plates, its tables of machines, in short, this project in which Diderot played an essential role - it was d'Alembert who wrote the introduction. He had a fairly transversal knowledge for the time, an extraordinary versatility, even though mathematics was his strongest suit, his main area of expertise.
1:02:22 Why am I mentioning this? Because he could still say, at the time, 'All our knowledge is divided into simple and compound.' The scientists present here understand what I mean, and they know very well that physics gave up long ago on saying there are simples and compounds. The simple - the simple, those were the elements, stoicheia, we get that from Greek. When Democritus was the first to form the hypothesis that around us, what we believed to be wholes divided into infinitesimal parts, into parts so small that they could not be divided beyond that smallness, that they were uncuttable, in short, atomos - that means 'a' privative.
1:03:02 There is no part. You know what the 'tomes' in books are? It means parts - first volume, second volume, first tome, second tome, first part, second part. 'Atom' means without parts, so small it can't be divided. There you go. We saw that at first they were molecules, so that's anything but indivisible, right? Look at the water molecule - it already divides into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen divides into two atoms. But the atom itself - not only does it, right there, contradict its own etymology by not being indivisible, but it also divides into a nucleus and electrons.
1:03:37 And within the nucleus - well, I'll let others continue after me, I'm going to stop - there are gluons, neutrons, protons, gluons... Do you realize where this is heading? And then there are the charms, the quarks, even colors, I've heard mentioned. There you go. Each time we think we've finally reached the fundamental particle, and each time it divides further. In reality, there is no pure origin. But on the other hand, from d'Alembert's side, it's still a beautiful spirit of abstraction: 'All our knowledge is divided into simple and compound.'
1:04:07 That means everything we see around us is a composition of simple elements. Once you have the bricks of the Meccano set, of the Lego set if you will, you can rebuild anything. Very optimistic for knowledge. It was very useful at one point. It's linked to philosophical traditions called mechanism - not mechanism in the industrial sense, even though that's related. We only retain two things: matter and motion. Descartes weighs in on that side, doesn't he? Matter and motion, as far as the external world is concerned. Otherwise, there's thought, in Descartes.
1:04:38 Careful. On the outside, give me matter and motion, that's enough. Extension and even motion, that suffices for Descartes. The res extensa. The extended thing and the thinking thing. The extended thing is in motion. There. So, that's the fantasmatic dream of a pure origin: being satisfied, for the sake of knowledge, to reduce everything to simple elements that then only need to be recombined afterward. Look at the pivotal moment of the Discourse on Method, from a strictly theoretical point of view - the key moment.
Descartes's precepts: evidence and analysis 1:05:10 It's not the deepest or most important moment, but it's the one where Descartes is most precise about the revolution he brings about, and especially about what he calls his method. Method, in Aristotle, means volumes and volumes of logic on which generations of philosophy students have worn themselves out, right? The Categories, as the collective title in Aristotle - I'll get back to Descartes, don't worry - the Organon, which means in Greek 'the tool,' 'the instrument,' 'the organ,' the tool. Before starting to do philosophy, beginners in Aristotle's school started with the Organon - just as in physics lab classes, before... sorry, in shop class, in manual training - I mean, you're taught to use tools before making objects with them. That's exactly it: the tool, the organon, Aristotle's logic - one learns to use words, language, before applying oneself to any reality whatsoever. That's a very good start, in Aristotle, and it fills volumes and volumes, as I told you: the Categories, On Interpretation, the Prior Analytics, the Posterior Analytics,
1:06:20 the Topics - you don't need, you can forget all that. Descartes has four principles, each of which takes just a few lines. He wanted to clean house - all of scholasticism, it wasn't just that it had had its day, he thought he'd be satisfied with the following four principles. The first was never to accept anything as true which he did not evidently know to be so, that is to say, carefully to avoid prejudice, bias, and hastiness - the sort produced by habit, which makes me say 'tomorrow the sun will rise' as if it were a certainty. Well, in Lapland, it's in six months that day will come. Yes, but yes - one must be wary of these so-called self-evident truths which, in fact, as Hume will see very clearly in the eighteenth century, are due only to habit. Habit is not a criterion of truth. Proof: it's not - I've always noticed that when I take an object and let go of it, it falls - yes, in space? No, that's actually the exception; it's only near the Earth that this happens - in the vast majority of the cosmos, the object I release floats in the air. Look at Captain Haddock and his whisky in Tintin. So Descartes is right to say that one must carefully avoid
1:07:30 prejudice and hastiness, and include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I could have no occasion to doubt it. I won't comment further - it would take pages, and it has been done, pages and pages. It seems simple, but 'to have no' - it doesn't just mean one must doubt as a matter of principle and method, it goes much further: one must have no occasion to doubt it at all. The word 'occasion' is strong for the time - it means that if there's the slightest element causing even the slightest doubt, one must act as if it were absolutely false. That's Descartes's principle. 'I resolved to regard as false everything that was merely probable' - that's his strength, there's no in-between; it might not be a hundred percent, but it's probable - to include nothing more in my judgments than what showed itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind that I had no occasion to doubt it. That was the first principle. The second was to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible - that's called the principle of analysis,
1:08:40 to divide, to analyze, it's the same thing. What is a urine analysis, if not analyzing this organic substance to show there's ammonia in it, crystals, etc.? And analyzing water to show that in the end there are two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, etc. To analyze means to break a whole down into its parts, that's to divide. The activity of dividing - this is no longer Descartes speaking, it's another quotation - 'the activity of dividing is the force and the labor of the understanding, that is, of the most prodigious power there is, or rather of the absolute power.'
1:09:15 Hegel, in the preface to the Phenomenology. The activity of dividing, the analytic moment of thought - that's what allows you, on a line segment, to isolate a point by thought. You can divide it infinitely. You can say that between 9.9 and 10, you can divide the interval into a billion parts. You're entitled to. Yes or no? Actually, I don't know.
1:09:45 By right, yes. Since there's still a tenth left, that's enormous. You understand why - in dreams, here I'm intervening a bit, I'm extrapolating, I'm telling you honestly, but it seems to me there's a connection. You know, they've done measurements - someone, what did you dream about? A whole story. I'll try to tell it to you badly. It would take fifty films to tell it properly. And in fact, they measure that he slept a second and a half. You've all experienced this, that there's a dilation of time in dreams.
1:10:19 This is an occasion to quote Nerval, as you might expect. 'Returning to my bed, I could not find rest. Sunk in a half-drowsiness' - a half-somnolence, a half-sleep, a half-drowsiness, a quarter-sleep - it's precise, literature. 'Sunk in a half-drowsiness, all my youth reappeared in my memories. This state, in which the mind still resists the bizarre combinations of the dream, often allows one to see, crowded into a few moments, the most striking scenes of a long period of one's life.'
1:10:49 Look at Proust, the moment of the Madeleine, it takes pages and pages, and how long did it last? A few seconds? There you go, so even a second is a lot when you divide it. In a second, there are billions of fractions of a second. It's a French company, I've forgotten the name, which is well known, and even used by NASA, for the most precise measurement of time, in an isotopic way, I presume.
1:11:19 You see, because it doesn't look like much, a billionth of a second for us. But on the other hand, when you send satellites over long distances and so on, it can make enormous differences. So that's to tell you not to underestimate how far analysis can go. It's true, it's Hegel's strange passage. The activity of dividing is the strength and the work of the understanding, not of sensibility which unifies, on the contrary, nor of reason either, but of the understanding.
1:11:52 When I say this tablet, it has a top, a bottom, a left, a right, it's extraordinary. It's a thing, you know. And then I distinguish parts. And then I can say here, here is the table, but it's an immense "here," isn't it? Where is here? Is it there or there? There are plenty of "heres." And as Hegel always says in this, no, not quite the preface, in the first chapter. The "here" intended was the point, but it is not.
1:12:22 The "here" is a negative. It's like when we say "now," between "now" and "no," the now is already past. There, I won't bore you further, but these are good exercises for the mind, to tell you that when Descartes says to divide one's thoughts in order, that's the whole power of analysis. Don't forget that he's the one who nevertheless left to the mathematicians of posterity a tool that is used more than ever, namely Cartesian graphs. Y prime, Y, X prime, X. Even if it wasn't exactly him, isn't that so?
Assuming order: Cartesian dogmatism 1:12:52 It only took the next generation, Newton and Leibniz, to take that decisive step toward modern mathematics, so to speak, the infinitesimal calculus. So that's for the third rule. To compose one's thoughts in order, that's the opposite, the rule of synthesis, we're going to start from the elements to reconstitute the whole. That's where you'll see how important it is. To compose one's thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest and easiest to know, the first Lego elements are simpler than a crane built with those Legos.
1:13:28 And a house is more complex than a brick. To compose one's thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest and easiest to know, and rising as if by degrees to the knowledge of the most composite. That seems obvious. And then there's this key phrase, listen carefully: supposing even an order among those which do not follow one another naturally. It's nicely put, this French which still smells a bit of the provinces in Descartes' time, it's not yet the age of Louis XIV, let's not get sidetracked. Supposing even an order among those which do not follow one another naturally, that is, immediately.
1:14:00 Do you realize what that means? It means even when I don't see the way to pass, I don't know, from straight lines to curves. You know, you need the number pi to pass from one to the other. It's not obvious. The Egyptians found it empirically. It's magnificent, I admire it. But still, it seems crude to us today, and rightly so. How can you calculate the length of a circle? Have you ever tried putting tiles in a circular room? It's complicated. It's annoying. There are always pieces left over that you put in the cellar.
1:14:31 That's the squaring of the circle I'm talking about. It's become a metaphor in French for something insoluble. The squaring of the circle. How do you want to measure a circle with a ruler? With the number pi. But how did they manage it? When there was a column, a little string around the column, and then afterward you stretch the string out, you know the radius, and all you have to do is compare straight lines. Man is clever, you see, resourcefulness.
1:15:01 Well, that gave a 3.18 or a 3.20, I don't know, but that's already not bad for the time. So Descartes says that even when you don't see the way through, you have to assume that the order is there, you have to trust it. And the whole history of science proves Descartes right. Where we thought there would be no way through, there were ways through. Algorithms, complex numbers, imaginary numbers, etc., have allowed a considerable extension of the notion of number, which was originally limited, in Pythagoras, to what we call N today, the set of natural integers.
1:15:36 Don't forget that there wasn't even a negative number in Greek mathematics. There was only N plus, and not even zero. Who brought us zero? Which culture? It's not an individual, that kind of thing. Yes, that's what's often said, the Arabs. The Arabs, quite honestly, say they took it from the Hindus. The Arabs, it's an import-export business. Mokhtar, an import-export business. And yes, in the desert, if you will, you only transit and pass goods through, but you don't produce them in the desert.
1:16:09 I had a minister in Niger. He said to me, Dominique, what do you expect us to live on in the desert? If not from what passes through. That meant, well actually, it was the raiders. He said, now we've evolved. Now we pay someone to protect us from the raiders. We pay a guide. There you go. And once, I had a friend in Niger who had said to the gardeners — that's how they invented a word, it's creative, sub-Saharan Africa. The Tuareg, the Tuareg doesn't like doing certain kinds of work, they like being guards or drivers.
1:16:45 In the desert, you move around, the camel. And so, they were guards and gardeners. They invented "guardeners." And once, he had said — the friend had said to him — why do we never see roses in our garden like the neighbor's? A woman's matter. And there always has to be mediation between the woman and the servants. That's normal because it's she who has them on her hands. That's traditional life. I'm joking. So, but I'm not joking about this anecdote.
1:17:16 And so, the next day, he brings her a magnificent rose. Ah, she says, where did you find it? On the banks of the river? Because there are horticulturists there. No, I took it from his garden next door. The desert. Isn't that beautiful? And so, supposing even an order among those which are stubborn. Trusting that the real is ordered, even if I don't yet see all the mediations. That's exactly what defines what Kant, in the following century, would call philosophical dogmatism.
1:17:52 Be careful, this isn't the very pejorative sense of dogmatism in the ordinary sense, it doesn't mean the stubborn, narrow-minded guy. Descartes is someone who doubts in an almost pathological way. Think of the evil genius who employs all his industry to deceive me. Almost paranoid, Descartes. No, no, that's not it. What I'm telling you is, some who have notebooks of definitions, a position of thought for which there is no assignable limit to knowledge.
1:18:24 That doesn't mean we've already known everything, but there's no assignable limit to knowledge. You know, Archimedes said, give me a fulcrum and I will move the world. That's what dogmatism is. Descartes says, give me the method. It's right after these four principles — I interrupt myself on the Discourse on Method because I'm going to quote him rather than talk behind his back — that there's this sentence I already quoted you, where he says these long chains of reasons, all simple and easy, chains of reasons, for Descartes, it's about the order of reasons, you start with the simple and move toward the more composite, these long chains of reasons, all simple and easy — easy for him — which geometers are accustomed to using to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to imagine — watch out, we're no longer in reasoning — had given me occasion to imagine that all the things which can fall under human knowledge follow one another in the same way.
1:19:22 Well now, in the same way as in mathematics? And here you'll see where the cognitive optimism lies, it's a sentence that speaks for itself: and that, provided only that one abstains from taking as true anything which is not so — you agree, the metaphor of chains of reasons, if you remove one link, everything collapses, there mustn't be a single false thing in an axiomatic system, otherwise everything collapses — and provided one always follows the order required, there can be none so far removed that one may not eventually reach it, nor so hidden that one may not discover it.
Kant, Planck and Hume: the limits of law 1:19:58 You see, like when you lift a sheet or a veil off a naked woman, we say that truth comes naked out of the well, don't we? There's a voyeuristic side to Descartes: there can be none so far removed that one may not eventually reach it, nor so hidden that one may not discover it. There you go. That's exactly what Kant will call dogmatism, and you know that he, Kant, will conclude his thought by saying that we must limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. That's curious. One might think that in the Age of Enlightenment, on the contrary, it's the unlimited development of reason.
1:20:31 It's that the Enlightenment culminates with Kant, doesn't it? Who says there's no limit, he's right against Descartes, there's no limit. But it's within a certain genre, it's within knowledge of the external world. Here I'm moving forward now, I'm no longer commenting on Descartes. It's in the world that today we'd call the hard sciences, the so-called sciences of nature, to be precise, isn't it? Chemistry, physics, and of course their common code, which they owe to mathematics. Without which they wouldn't be sciences.
1:21:04 Kant is the first to say that we would never stop progressing in that field. I recommend it to you, even though it's admittedly harder reading, the extraordinary introduction to the Critique of Judgment, which is Kant's testament. It seems difficult, but the little you'll understand of it is treasure. I say "the little" because I myself don't understand everything. Well, I mean, what I understand is still debated afterward. I'm not the only one debating it. Well, the essential upshot is that in it he says there are two domains.
1:21:34 There is the domain of legislation by nature and the domain of legislation by freedom. And between the two, an unbridgeable abyss. There's a domain of legislation by nature. That's the domain in which Newton is competent. I'm the one adding this as a voiceover, but I know it's exactly what Kant thinks. That domain has its own methodology, doesn't it, which broadly comes down to the fundamental couple of cause and effect, of determinism, of effect by cause.
1:22:10 The generalization of the way in which the cause exerts its causality on the effect, expressed in the form of what we call, in physics, laws. Here I open a small parenthesis on Kant and give the floor to a twentieth-century physicist, and not just any one, since he is at the origin of what is most advanced in the fundamental models of contemporary physics — contemporary in the broad sense, modern, twentieth-century — with relativity, I'm thinking here of quanta, and I'm thinking of the one who played a decisive role, Max Planck, in a remarkable text where he asks, where he poses the question: what do we call a physical law?
1:22:47 It's interesting to see a physicist ask a philosophical question. What do we call it? The philosophical question par excellence. And he answers: a physical law consists in establishing a constant relation between two variables. He answers very well. He moves to a new line and asks a second question. That said — it's he who says it — do physical laws exist? You see how we move to the question of essence, what do you call it? How should we name something that exists or doesn't?
1:23:18 How should we name it? You can define an angel, a religious figure with wings who serves as a messenger. You can't very well define something without knowing whether it exists or not. That said, do physical laws exist? And here one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century asks: do physical laws exist? And he answers in an even more troubling way. Instead of answering yes or no, he begins by saying nothing prevents us from thinking that one fine day — I love "one fine day."
1:23:50 Nature, for reasons we cannot foresee, decides all of a sudden to change the legislation it has accustomed us to. That tomorrow bodies might fall according to some GT4-squared formula — no, absolutely not, mind you, that's him talking, not me. In any case, there is nothing in what we observe that forbids nature from changing its principle. This is where we see how much official science, positive science — even positivist here — bears the mark of what has been developed in philosophy, and which Einstein acknowledges as one of the most applicable ideas in science, from Hume — Hume in the eighteenth century, that is, the skeptic par excellence, the one who said: I put a pot on the fire and I look — since I'm in the eighteenth century, I'm a modern man, I have measuring instruments, I no longer say hot and cold, I leave that to doxa at the back of the cave, hot and cold, that's nonsense, what's hot for a Russian is cold for an African, no — I have a thermometer that measures temperature, because 30 degrees, 18, is hot and cold something for each person to decide, that's not scientific — but I have a thermometer and my pot of water and even a fire underneath and suddenly,
1:25:01 bubbles — I look at the thermometer, 100 degrees. From there, says Hume, to say water boils at 100 degrees — to say, therefore, that for now, all I've seen is this water, here and now, in the vicinity of London, it's David Hume speaking — boils at 100 degrees, but what tells me that tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and in 10,000 years, and at the North Pole and the South Pole, it will boil at 100 degrees? You may tell me I'm certain of it, that's possible, but here we're talking about a man of science, and an empiricist man of science.
1:25:31 We have England, the homeland of empiricism, the Anglo-Saxons. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I've never wondered, as the English do, whether what I'm being made to eat is really pudding. That's a political problem. Well, let's move on. Which pragmatism doesn't solve — let's not complicate things. But where he's right is that if my principle is empiricism, that is, if it's experience and sense experience, the back of the cave, what I see, what I measure — that goes further than the back of the cave, I measure — that wasn't there for the prisoners.
1:26:04 Measurement brings in number, calculation, brings in intelligible realities, the unit. The unit is an invention of the human mind, it's extraordinary. It doesn't exist in nature, the centimeter, the gram — come on. Nature submits to our measurement. That's not where we found them. So you see that scientific experimentation isn't reducible to the kind of experience claimed by someone who says, "Me, I know Black people, I lived 50 years in Africa," who has understood nothing, seen nothing.
1:26:40 And so, if experience is the foundation of my knowledge, by definition, I haven't experienced tomorrow, I haven't experienced 10,000 years from now, I haven't experienced Timbuktu — I can go to Timbuktu, but I can't go to every corner of the universe. So, says Hume, there is always an illegitimate leap from induction to deduction. I cannot deduce from experience that water boils at 100 degrees. I insist on making all these reminders today, because many newcomers have told me they arrived just as we moved on to the philosophy of action, when we dealt with poetic, concrete, complex texts, which only took on their full philosophical meaning if we recalled that we had allowed ourselves to do so only after a detour through abstract knowledge itself, on which we'd be ashamed to throw out gratuitous results.
1:27:30 So, once again, let's not confuse induction — inducing isn't stupid, but it has to be enough, you have to stop singing the same tune, at some point you say, well, we'll say that water boils at 100 degrees, like that, but we know that this law is revocable. Nature, as Max Planck will confirm, one fine day — nothing prevents nature, one fine day, from making bodies fall, horribile dictu, according to some GT4-squared formula. There is no continuous passage from induction to deduction.
1:28:04 So all this, to comment on a small passage from the third principle of Descartes' method — I won't talk about the fourth, the fourth is about making enumerations, reviews, in order then to systematize, so it's not very complicated — I'll stay with the third, where there's this philosophical stake: to conduct one's thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest, the easiest to know, and rising as if by degrees to the knowledge of the most composite, supposing even an order among those which do not follow one another naturally. This trust that the object of knowledge is ordered, and that the whole effort of the mind itself must be to recover that order, which allows one to put things in their place.
The Promethean stepladder: Babel, Jacob, the devil 1:28:45 You see, who spirited it away? The stepladder? Was there a stepladder there? Yes, it left with her. The rungs, you see, if there were no rungs, there'd be a gap, I couldn't rise as if by degrees, as he says. For Descartes, you can always find and make an intermediate, a little stair step that lets me go above. It doesn't look like much, but it's the whole construction of humanism, all the same.
1:29:17 There's a Promethean side to it. You get the impression that Prometheus got a kick to go steal fire from Olympus, right, and hand it over to us. There's a fine metaphor of going from below to above, look. I already told you there was a link between the myth of Prometheus, the Greek, pagan myth, and the Judeo-Christian myth of the Tower of Babel. In both cases, what is impious in man, as the gods or God judge it, is wanting to make oneself equal to what is above, yes or no.
1:29:51 I'm telling you this because people say the Judeo-Christians came and ruined this beautiful pagan world. It's basically the same thing, for the essential point. There are fundamentally different things, but as regards this, guilt, it's always the same thing. That's precisely where people want to distinguish them, which is quite extraordinary. I could even refine this — it's not my subject, so I won't dwell on it — but I could find you a passage in the Gospel where Jesus says, "You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one." He talks like a Greek there. Like an amateur Greek.
1:30:22 I'm quoting the text for you, do what you want with it. When he says to the Pharisees, about the adulterous woman they want to stone, "You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one." On the other hand, he's merciless. The religion of pity par excellence, and of forgiveness, is implacable on a single sin. Which one? The sin. Yes, that is, the sin, as in the Gospel it's called sin. Not of the body, but yes, the sin against the spirit, that's the only one that isn't forgivable.
1:30:53 Let me remind you, in the Gospel we're actually quite far from the puritanism that the Church which claims it has accustomed us to for centuries. A comic and profound parenthesis. "Clouscard." Yes, yes, yes, no, Clouscard is serious business, especially when he's joking. And there, he wasn't joking, he was angry. We were at an evening event with — the younger ones don't know him — Father Marc Oraison, do you remember? Well now, I guess I'm the only old-timer after all. He was a hard-hitting priest, an avant-garde priest as there are in every era.
1:31:23 "But all that's nonsense they tell you at church. Nowadays, we're plugged in." Yes, he was hanging out in the salons in '68 with Cohn-Bendit. "No, no, but that's fine." At one point he said, "But the devil, that's just an invention, it's stupid. How can anyone still believe in the devil?" Clouscard exploded. We were there. "For 20 centuries you people bothered us with the devil, we burned witches. Your buddies, they burned my grandmother because she was his neighbor and she had a toothache remedy with an ointment, you had her burned. And now you tell us it was all a joke.
1:31:55 You're going to believe in the devil in front of me!" Isn't that a good one? There are always opportunists in life, aren't there. They always come out on top. Those who send people to the stake, those who laugh about it afterward. "Oh no, it was nothing. You're going to believe in the devil." There you go. So, I wanted to... to dwell on the principles of the method to remind you that there's something Promethean in these little stair steps that Descartes says are always there at our disposal.
1:32:33 You know, in the Bible, I mentioned the stepladder. Can you guess which image in the Bible? Yes? Bravo. Jacob's Ladder, which is the title of one of the most beautiful operas of the twentieth century, a miniature opera, make the most of it, it doesn't last long. Well, all right, it's by Schoenberg, it grates on the ears. Well, when you're not used to it — it's a marvel. Die Jakobsleiter, Jacob's Ladder. It's a... maybe Claude knows it.
1:33:03 Claude has very fine musical culture. I'm sure he knows more than one piece by Schoenberg, but not Jacob's Ladder. It's a marvel. And you see, it's very biblical, this — the Tower of Babel, Jacob's Ladder. A third little comic parenthesis, from the time when relics were sold in the Middle Ages. You know, that's why Luther rose up, not entirely without reason. He has other faults, Luther, but on this he was right. About what?
1:33:33 About rising up against the fact that people were selling, at the market, a feather fallen from the archangel Gabriel when he made the Annunciation. Or a rung from the ladder that Jacob saw in his dream. Jacob's Ladder is Jacob who, in a dream, saw a ladder on which men were going up and down from heaven. You see, so even religion allows for a passage, a mediation from below to above — making the griffon rise from the sea and the crane come down from the sky.
Hegel, Plato and the dialectic of the Sophist 1:34:07 Strange as a formula - it's Nerval who wrote that, a fragment. To make the griffin of the sea rise up and to make the crane of the sky come down. That is the task of man, to unite the high and the low. There. So this myth of the cave has taken us quite far. But today I wanted to insist on the second part, the redescent. one is not a philosopher, one cannot claim to follow Plato. And neo-Platonism - Hegel is right to be wary of it - which settles for the murky mysticism of someone who reaches contemplation and confuses Plato with Zen or with respect, that's traditions.
1:34:40 But Plato isn't that. He's a political man. That's why we put him at that end of the table and Hegel at the other. And yet another illustration of their relation. I don't care about proper names, you know. I mean, I'm not here to talk about a particular case, but to show that this is a constant in the history of philosophy. Namely that in his political testament, the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, which for Hegel are more or less the equivalent of what the Republic and the Laws together are in Plato.
1:35:14 Let me remind you, I said last time that the Republic closes the first series of dialogues, the aporetic dialogues. That is, running from the Apology of Socrates up to the Republic. After that comes the Phaedo, and the Laws close things off... after that he dies, he's old. The second series of dialogues, the one that begins with the crisis of the Parmenides, where all of Platonism is blown apart by Plato himself. Everything starts over from zero. And it ends, in passing, with the Laws.
1:35:47 I won't dwell on it without mentioning in passing that it's in the Sophist, the second dialogue of this second series, the sequel to the Parmenides - it's in the Sophist that Plato becomes immense. That is, Plato, son of an aristocrat, an aristocrat and so tends to privilege the identical over the different, the permanent over becoming. Becoming is for those who work, for the proles who wear themselves out. We, we live in the eternity of the statues of the gods. Plato humbles himself by acknowledging that there is no identity without alterity, that there is no same without the other.
1:36:21 It's in the Sophist that he raises dialectic to the level of ontology. Being itself is dialectical. Up to that point, dialectic, as I've shown here, was only the path leading to being, but being itself was not dialectical. It was not contradictory, if you like - it contained no opposition. Starting with the Sophist, he acknowledges that identity cannot be identified except through the mediation of something other than itself. It's admirable. There.
1:36:51 I can only allude to these complex things. Only Heraclitus had sensed this before him. So I recall this here, if I've put these things side by side, it's because in his political testament, that is in the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, in the preface - a rather irritated preface, this old Hegel who has proven himself and is tired of showing the same things again, etc. And he's also irritated because there's Macron... as he's called, Metternich.
Political aside: Macron, war and "this country" 1:37:23 No, no, let's not pay Macron that compliment. Macron is a puppet of Metternich. Let me clarify my thought. I don't feel like talking about it, so I'll talk about it quickly. Macron - because we will talk about it - about his laws, this and that. There will maybe be a few people in the street, as usual, making a bit of rock music. That won't stop him from pushing through the pension reform. Don't worry about that. But he's there to wage war on Russia. That was decided years ago, Macron, and from outside France, because France is a nuisance by being French.
1:37:59 It took the whole Holy Alliance to turn all of Europe against France, already after the French Revolution, under the rule of Metternich, with England's money. I love the English, I love the Austrians - worse, I haven't even mentioned, I love Mozart and Shakespeare - so don't go making this into xenophobia, you'd be picking the wrong target. But at the time, that's how it was. Now it's no longer England that finances the United States, it's not a matter of insularity.
1:38:30 But France is a nuisance. In this country - that's how every bit of far-right talk begins, which is anti-French. You think the far right is for France? It's been making people believe that for some years now. Me, I'm old, I've heard all the far-right people, the OAS, during the Algerian War, start out saying 'in this country.' I remind you, it's always started like that: 'in this country.' There's too much democracy, etc., too much mess, too many parties, I don't know, 'in this country.' We're not as disciplined as the English, not as hardworking as the Germans, not as efficient as the Americans, not as disciplined as the Japanese.
1:39:05 We have none of these qualities, we're all crazy in this country. Look, if you want a change from that tone - it's not what I meant to say, but I can't help pointing it out, and this is serious, I'm doing transmission here. There's a text that's an antidote to that 'in this country' talk. Not a text from a National Front, new-model version, waving the blue-white-red flag ever since the left threw it in the trash. Before, it waved the white flag with the fleur-de-lis; the blue-white-red flag was the revolution, it was the 'gueuse,' democracy, which it hated.
1:39:36 It really took the left being abject in every way for the National Front to be able to claim the blue-white-red flag. I close the parenthesis. Europe trembled when the blue-white-red flag advanced with the armies of the Revolution. The Europe of aristocracies and feudalism and slavery. So there's a text that serves as an antidote to that vision of France as always having only faults and no qualities, it's, I'd say, the overture, in musical terms.
1:40:06 The preface, the introduction to a collection of poems by Aragon written during the Resistance, called La Diane Française. Read that admirable preface which begins 'There are ponds, ponds where I see the image of centuries reflected,' and so it begins. It contains everything that's being said now. We've been told that this country is no longer a country, that it's decadent, that it consumes too much. Already, 1940, you see?
1:40:38 Yes, that's what was said at the time of Pétain. The Germans - it served us right, because we deserved it. We wanted to consume more than we produced. Yes, it's all old, all repetition. So, that's not my subject - La Diane Française, the introduction, is admirable, in prose. The poems that follow are even more beautiful. Among them you'll recognize a few you know. 'He who believed in heaven, he who did not' is in there. I mean, among others, 'La Rose et le Réséda,' etc.
1:41:09 'I crossed the bridges of Cé'... well, one feels like reciting them all. Let's not start. Why do I mention this now? Because I was saying that Macron was chosen for - in case there's war against Russia, against China, against Eurasia, everything that's not quite aligned with those who sow death and desolation in Afghanistan, in the Maghreb, and now even in Black Africa, for I don't know how many generations.
1:41:47 What I'm saying is serious. Well, it started between crisis and war, my story. He was chosen - well, only the French don't want to look at what that bastard Chirac did, how he let us down when we were going to finish off Iraq with the Americans. Chirac didn't want to. Chirac's no Bolshevik, frankly. And he could travel the world with his secretary, etc., at the taxpayer's expense. Whatever - there was full employment. Whereas Cahuzac, you see, he asked us to tighten our belts, but he was putting his own money in Switzerland.
1:42:21 You see, I'm not defending Chirac - crooks, all of that, likeable crooks. The people aren't fooled. There's a way of slapping the cows on the rear. Mitterrand had it - Mitterrand, that's my slip of the tongue. Hollande never had that way about him. He does this, then that. No, I'm not saying anything good about Chirac. I'll say he had the intelligence - he'll have had the intelligence reports saying the French don't agree with going to war. You see, Chirac's politics, like de Gaulle's, he had a sense of the State, he knew how far one could go.
1:42:51 He didn't go to war. Neither did Schröder, to be fair. Those are the two who said no to the second Gulf War. Which made Condoleezza Rice say - you'll understand why I'm anti-communitarian, I'm against Blacks and against women. I'm against Blacks as an identity, well, that doesn't mean what I haven't said. Black people understand me very well. I'm against those who make blackness a political category. Condoleezza Rice was the far right, she was the Secretary of State of the other drunken idiot, what was his name, Bush Junior.
1:43:29 The one who always showed off his jeans belt buckle to display the Texas coat of arms. Well, well, poor old thing, a reformed drunk. A poor guy, let's not dwell on it too long. But then his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who came out of the board of one of the Seven Sisters, the oil companies - it wasn't Texaco, it was Mobil - said, following Schröder's double refusal, etc., 'We'll have to come to terms with Russia,' who of course had said no, had opposed it: 'forgive Germany and punish France.'
1:44:07 If you remember. Yes, so you see, it takes someone who, here, since Mitterrand, tries - the Holy Alliance, call it what you like, NATO, I don't care, Europe, Bilderberg, I'm not into conspiracy theory, it can change shape, it's flexible - but France, that keeps me from just going in circles, there's still resistance, these damned French are attached to their pensions, to negotiation by sector rather than by company, all of that - it's annoying, but still, there's resistance, there are still things resisting in France. A guy like Macron, hopefully - and then the young, no, the pretty boys - not me speaking, I saw little old ladies being interviewed who said, they were asked, what's the spirit of his program that you approve of?
Replacing the good with freedom: the black sun 1:45:11 'Ah, I don't know his program, but he's cute' - there, I don't hold it against those little old ladies. I wanted to remind you that all of this is the political, I mean, and so I come to my last determination - I haven't let you raise this question yourselves, but I had time to make up. It's that the closer we get to the sun - and that's my great difference with Plato, I'm not talking about myself, our difference, we moderns can keep this schema, there's just one single change to make for it to still work today - does anyone remember, I did this at the end of, in June 2016, yes, Pierre?
1:45:51 Ah yes, but that's already the result, you're going too fast, and the negative in passing, the sun has to become black, that is, yes, but that's it, the result is that we're going - it's not a real pair of pants, it's a rag, it's a bit crude, anyway, I'll try, there, oula, these things are complicated, I don't dare spit it out in front of you, yes, I'll get there. So here, yes, if we replace the good with freedom - don't confuse this, mind you - freedom means we're free to do evil as well as good, the French language, as well as good, evil, not quite the same, but above all, before getting there, it's true, that's it, but you've taken away a mediation from me, it's a mediation, I'll borrow it from Nietzsche, Nietzsche, whom one must know, the one who, right from the start, in Beyond Good and Evil,
1:47:01 which is one of his darkest books - I told you we're heading toward that in black - in the same way I reminded you that we went from the Enlightenment, whose ideal was happiness - you see happiness, the sun, a golden ball, or of honey, as you like, it's the same color, all that, it's ripe wheat - as we went from that to the mal du siècle in one generation, and after the mal du siècle, the 19th century, that of Romanticism, the century of evil, that of carnage - I'm serious when I speak of black. Nietzsche, at the start of Beyond Good and Evil, says all philosophers who dispute have the right to know, it's the right method, empiricism, rationalism, etc., in short, they don't share the same conception of truth, but none disputes that they are seeking truth, and above all, none disputes that truth is a value. And there Nietzsche says: and why not the untrue? And why shouldn't the untrue be superior in value to the true, if the truth is unbearable - what's the point of going to seek it? That's what he means.
1:48:11 You know, you've all found yourselves in that position, wondering whether to tell someone the truth or not, it depends on how serious things are, but it happens to all of us, it can concern health, it can concern - damn it, does he need to be told his wife is cheating on him with all of Paris, or her husband, you see, it's complicated, sometimes with truth we wonder if we should tell it. And then with children, you see - it says in the Gospel, 'woe to those through whom scandal comes,' right after he said, 'let the little children come to me,' and he adds that phrase which Kierkegaard noticed - otherwise I wouldn't mention it, I'm not doing religion, I'm doing philosophy - Kierkegaard, who knew the sacred texts admirably, said this phrase is terrible in the Gospel, the one that follows, I haven't told you - Christ adds, 'it is impossible that scandal should not come, but woe to him through whom it comes' - meaning that even God cannot prevent scandal. Yes, one thinks before revealing certain truths to those for whom they could be fatal, or harmful, or prejudicial, as once a doctor told me, oncologists often -
1:49:22 they all ask to know the truth, and once they have it, they collapse like a stone, we can no longer manage to cure them. Yes, I'm giving very simple examples, but here it's much more fundamental, what Nietzsche says, isn't it, that means that - and then Nietzsche dies, and after him there's Freud - ah, if Nietzsche and Freud had met, it might have healed Nietzsche, poor old man, but at what cost, because he would have had to give up quite a few illusions. No, what does Freud say? He says there is in us a will to not-know, which has a well-known Freudian name - yes, what I don't want to know, it's repression, or, during the treatment, what he calls resistances - 'but I never thought that, not at all, I'm a good guy,' there you go. So this story of the black sun, of my dear Nerval, you see it's not entirely foolish, one shouldn't be too surprised that it takes time - it's not about reaching the ideal city, as Plato wants, that's taken 20 centuries, and now, at this last New Year, we have Macron. There, I conclude on that,
1:50:33 it's to reassure you, it's a moment of back and forth, but I trust you all, to keep pushing further. There, until next time.
