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Questions from the audience: the object of the sciences, sign and meaning 0:00 Hello Dominique. Good evening Philippe. So, here we are gathered again live for the questions raised during the workshop of December 21st. So, as usual, I'm going to read you the first question. This is a question that came up after the workshop. It's a question from Lionel.
0:31 I didn't quite understand the difference between a science defined by an object and a science that doesn't define its object. In what way is asking the question "what do you call this?" strictly speaking a philosophical question? It's not clear. Thanks. If I may, I'd like you to move straight on to the two other questions because they aren't very long in their wording.
1:01 Because both of them, obviously, take up more or less the same issues. It's about the sign and meaning, which is what I think we're going to see. Since I recall these were asked at the end of the last workshop, at a point when I never have enough time to answer them. And it seems to me that the first question, which you've just—not summarized, but restored in full—allows me to deal with all three at once.
1:31 That is, the one you've just formulated, Lionel's, and go ahead with the other two. So, Hugo's question dealt with the articulation between the confused relation between meaning and sign, the distinction between symbol and comparison in Hegel's Aesthetics, and forgetting, repression, the Freudian tertium quid, in Introduction to Psychoanalysis. And Samuel had picked up on the same subject.
2:06 He had pointed out that the sign-meaning distinction is not explicitly a Kantian theme. He spoke of the emergence of anthropology via the relation between meaning and sign. On one side, meaning-sign in anthropology, and on the other, cause-effect at the level of nature. He had pointed out the temptation to project the cause-effect structure onto meaning-sign, a meaning-causality of the sign. But, on the contrary, it would be a matter of a dialectic between inner meaning and outer sign.
2:41 That's quite clear, thank you. So, yes, I'll come back to Lionel's question, who... I'm not here to hand out prizes, but I'm very grateful to him for admitting that he didn't understand. That's the ideal in philosophy, not only for progressing oneself, but here, in this case, for others too. These are questions we never dig into enough.
3:11 Which question? The one about... There are two linked together in his question, Lionel's. First, the distinction between the properly philosophical question, "what do you call...?" as I see it—I think that's the properly Socratic question, the one that even initiates the specificity of philosophical questioning as opposed to philosophy—is not the only one.
3:41 to be an occasion for questioning. There's the religious sphere, there's the political sphere, there's the moral sphere, there's the... I won't say metaphysical, because that's a part of philosophy. But there's the sphere, of course, the scientific sphere, where questions are also asked. So, it's actually very important to come back to this question, insofar as I maintain—but I'm going to develop it, I'm not going to leave such important information hanging, I'm not going to just assert it gratuitously—that the question "what do you call...?" is far more radical than the question "what is it?", far more foundational, that is, one that really gets at the true problems at their base, and the one that presupposes the least, that locks a response into the question the least.
4:37 So, the more a question, the more a way of posing a problem, a question, is ideological, the more it's a false problem, if you will, the more it tends to force one to answer with a single answer to the exclusion of others. I'll try not to do the same thing. Here, that's precisely not the case. The question "what do you call...?"—and he has the courage to say, and I thank him for it, because I'm sure it wasn't clear for everyone.
5:13 How can one say "every science is defined by its object"? Indeed, I said so, commenting on a passage from Durkheim—I recall, I'll come back to it right away—that is, it's not a passage from a philosopher stricto sensu—and then, a science is defined by its object, but a science does not define its object. I understand that this deserves to be dug into a bit. So, here we go.
5:44 Thanks to Lionel's questioning, I'm going back to the very beginning of the workshops, almost five years ago, that is, to my first public talks, where I had started a series of talks with the generic title "Between Crisis and War, comma, Philosophy, Question Mark." It was at the same time an initiation, because it was somewhat within the framework of popular education, I had started in the 14th arrondissement.
6:19 It was an introduction to philosophy, I took as my pretext, of course, but a serious pretext, the crisis situation in which we've been debating at least since 2008, even if the crisis goes back further, but anyway everyone acknowledges that since 2008, it can't be hidden. And finally, to extend my parenthesis, we're in it more than ever, since every time people say we've come out of it, "that's it, things are getting better," each time the crisis worsens and deepens, and we go down a further level in depth instead.
6:53 Now there are even plenty of people saying that business is going to make this the year of all dangers on the stock market and financial level, but well, I'm no prophet, I leave that to the traders. So, for now, Between Crisis and War, Philosophy, Question Mark, was a pretext for introducing—including for those... I wasn't addressing a particularly academic or even school audience, but really the general public.
7:24 And this demands a very particular exercise in expression, so that it absolutely doesn't become an occasion for reduction, quite the contrary. I recall that having taught—teaching in the final year of high school was my job—in countries where French isn't the mother tongue, and where, I'm thinking of sub-Saharan Africa, one can't expect from the students the same more or less conscious cultural complicities that we all share in geographic proximity, this forces the person transmitting knowledge to lay out the concepts flat, in order to be well heard, to be well understood.
8:09 And they even force one to construct approaches, divisions and distinctions, almost exploratory ones, which we're not used to making, when we can count, as we do in Europe, on the more or less conscious assumption that the student's parents have books at home that could go deeper. Whereas there, when there's no cultural continuity, and there's a material deprivation that means we can't expect the student to consult books and works on the authors or problems raised when they go home, this forces a radicalization of the questioning.
The ziggurat: "what is it?" or "what do you call...?" 8:55 So, I'll recall, yes, that the first philosophy class must always begin there, that is, with a reminder of what constitutes the specificity of the Socratic question. I borrow from Plato's dialogue the fact that Socrates immediately begins by saying, through interlocutors, what do you call virtue? I want to know what courage is, I'll go find specialists. The general who distinguished himself in such a battle against the Persians, or else, I ask him, you who always talk about courage, how would you define it?
9:35 What do you call courage? To the artist, he'll say, what do you call the beautiful, etc. All this is very familiar. So one might say, fine, "what do you call" versus "what is it"? What are you splitting hairs about? The distinction is enormous. I'm going to dig into this, it's important. And I'll start digging into it with the help of a diagram, an imaginary diagram that I ask you to picture. I have no blackboard. But it's very simple to picture. Picture a ziggurat. A ziggurat was the little towers on which Chaldean astrologers climbed to examine the magnificent starry sky of those desert countries.
10:07 It's no accident that astronomy was born in desert countries, where the caravan must not get lost and where shepherds stay out long at night with their flocks, nomads, under the starry vault of the sky—one must speak like Kant here. So, picture little towers. The Tower of Babel is certainly a memory in the Bible of a tower a bit taller than the others. And let's imagine on this tower someone whose function is that of an astronomer, if you will, even if it was mostly the astrologer, but who has the function of an astronomer—he was said to be an observer, moreover—and who asks himself, what is the Moon?
10:54 By observing it, etc., he wonders about the being of the Moon. That's the question "what is the Moon?" I say, that's a scientific question. And now, let me try to imagine, I ask you to imagine, at the foot of the tower, someone who isn't up above looking at the stars, a rather pot-bellied and fairly bearded little man. Well, that's the image we have of the philosopher, I'm not sure he actually looked like that, but anyway, he seems to have been a bit stocky, judging from the few sculptures that have come down to us. So, a little man who stays at the foot of the ziggurat, and who addresses, not the object of the previous person's questioning, that is, not the Moon, the Sun, whatever he's looking at among the stars, but who addresses the one who is questioning the sky, and asks him "What do you call the Moon?"
11:48 So, one might say, "Okay, fine, we get that it's not quite the same statement, but really, why insist and dig into this distinction? Doesn't it amount to the same thing?" Far from it, and here now is an abyss of differences, or rather differences that show there's an abyss between the two questions. First, in the first case, that of the astronomer or astrologer questioning the sky, the object doesn't answer, it's a monologue.
12:18 Whereas the little Socrates at the foot of the ziggurats addresses someone who speaks, the one at the top of the tower, he asks him in fact, "What do you call a star? What do you call a planet?" So there's someone who can answer. And we pass from monologue to dialogue. That's no small thing. And we further notice that in the question "What is it?" the verb "to be" resounds twice, moreover, "being is given."
12:50 We presuppose that the thing "is," exists, in the ontological sense, "is" here, and the question no longer bears except on essence and not on existence. That is, given that the Moon exists, what is it? Is it a planet? Is it a star? Is it a sphere? An oval? Does it have a circular trajectory, elliptical? One can ask all sorts of questions, but we're talking about something that is assumed to exist. The question bears on the "what," but not on being.
13:23 Whereas by saying "What do you call...?", one takes the problem back to its root. That is, I don't know whether what we're talking about exists, since you haven't yet defined for me what it is. Let's imagine we're talking about God instead of the stars now, and that the problem is posed—it's not the first time, nor the last—of the existence of God, which arises in religion, in philosophy, in metaphysics, in spirituality, whatever. The philosophical attitude begins by saying "What do you call God?"
13:56 That's not at all the same answer in polytheism, where we're dealing more with the divine than with God. There are invisible nymphs in the springs who are there and whom one must avoid disturbing, moreover. The oaks murmur sacred words in the woods of Dodona, near Athens, that's the sacred grove. It was said that when the wind stirred the leaves of those oaks, these were words to which one had to pay attention, like prophecies. There you go.
14:26 That's not quite what is said of the God of transcendence, of the God of monotheistic religions, is it? So, what do you call God, once you can tell me how you call it—we'll see whether this thing, whether such a thing can exist or not. If God is freedom, for example, which isn't excluded—on the contrary, which is almost implied by the fact that religious people call him the Almighty, able to do whatever he wants, after all.
14:58 Well, among other attributes, of course, since he's also said to be infinitely—well, I'm speaking here of the God of transcendence—but if God is freedom, in that case, even from a perspective that a believer with the simple faith of a charcoal-burner would judge to fall under atheism—I'm thinking here of liberation theology, for which some got themselves massacred and cut to pieces in the struggles for social and political emancipation in Latin America, some, I mean, among many religious people whom I salute, who had taken the side of the guerrillas—for them, God, it's not a matter of knowing whether he exists or not, he can exist if we advance freedom in this world.
15:48 How does one say God? It's the community reconciled with itself, it's a somewhat theological vision of Spirit, there you go. I'm not trying to settle the problem of God here, I'm careful not to; I'm simply trying to show here the importance of the radicality of the question "what do you call...?" Because already, one can see from the answers to this question that the thing might not even be able to exist.
16:18 Mathematicians know this difficulty well, since they have an excellent method: when they study a function, I'm referring here to that mathematical discipline called analysis, of course, that immense field of mathematics, before studying a function that's going to be represented by a curve, a graph, one begins by stating initial restrictions.
16:50 If the function has the form y equals n over x, or a over x, one begins by saying that x must be different from 0, because it's impossible for a denominator to be zero in mathematics, that would contradict the very definition of the quotient. There you go. So, I hope I've shown Lionel that saying "what do you call...?" is a matter of passing from monologue to dialogue, from the attitude of someone questioning a mute something that will never answer, replacing it with a dialogue between, here for example, the observer of the stars and the philosopher.
The three conditions of science and the strangeness of measurement 17:44 And so, now, I come to the second part of his question, even though he formulated it first, after having recalled these very beginnings of philosophy which are so fundamental. Every science is defined by its object. Here I take "defined" exactly as what is called a domain of definition. I'm referring to mathematics twice now, quite simply. It's very simple, I tell Lionel, the set of animals defines the domain of zoology.
18:21 Just as the set of plants defines the domain of botany, the set of social facts defines the domain of sociology. I illustrated this with a passage from Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method when I raised this problem of the object of the sciences. But I think everyone understands that easily. On the other hand, what is indeed a bit less obvious is that while a science is defined by its object, that is, it has its own proper object, that isn't enough—I'll be more precise now since we have more time—for there to be a scientific relation to an object, for there to be a discourse that deserves the epithet "scientific" with respect to an object.
19:13 There must be at least these three conditions. First, that it have its own object, as I just said, the set of animals gives zoology its own object, which is not the object of biology, which is too vast, too general, nor even less that of soil mechanics. So, it must have its own object. First condition. Then, that it formulate laws about this object.
19:44 In other words, that it determine this object through laws. That's the second condition, that is, propositions that are true everywhere and always. In philosophy we say universal and necessary. Because a truth that holds on Monday and is false on Tuesday, or that holds in Paris and not in Montauban, isn't quite what we'd call a scientific truth. I recall that I'm speaking here only of scientific truths. And third, these laws must be formulated in such a way that they can lend themselves to an experiment in which a measurement takes place.
20:22 And there, of course, we move to quantification. I do say that they must be able to lend themselves to it. Let me give an example. When Newton says "All bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance," the law of universal gravitation, the notions of distance, mass, speed, later on, etc., are all susceptible to measurement. There are units of mass, the newton, the kilogram of mass, whatever—me, it doesn't matter—the gram, of course.
20:58 There are units of distance, the centimeter, the meter, whatever one wants, the parsec sometimes, isn't it? The distance light travels in a year. And at 300,000 km per second, that still makes astronomical figures, so to speak. Whereas, when philosophers say "In fact, what governs all men, as if it were a law, is power."
21:29 I'm thinking of Foucault, for example: it's power. Determining everything through powers, while also diluting power, moreover, since it's not only the power of a ruling class or a dictator, but the power of the master over the pupils, of the husband over his wife, ultimately—I don't know—or even in a homosexual couple, after all, of the dominant over the dominated, which means power gets diluted. But what's the unit of power? How are we going to measure that?
22:00 I'm not saying it's false, that it has nothing scientific about it. That's where we see the importance of the statement, which isn't mine but which is a consensus in the world of science, that there is science only of what is measurable. I stress it twelve times, at least twelve times—able. To make clear that we're not obliged to take measurements all the time, but it must be formulated in such a way that if there's a dispute and one must prove something, one has to.
22:30 go through an experiment in which the univocity of measurement comes into play. Let me extend this epistemological digression a bit, because we never remind ourselves enough of these... In times of crisis, we get so lost in problems of moral and political value that we forget the scientific problems of truth, which are so important, and without which we wouldn't get very far in the other domains.
23:02 When the fact that something lends itself to measurement—that's quite strange, it means that man has arrived at an intelligibility of the world around him, not an illusory mastery as is the case in magic—Open Sesame, and that would be the dream, it would just happen, open up. No. But an effective action on the surrounding world only since he took a detour through the scientific approach, since he...
23:37 he did not content himself with looking at the stars but also made equations to understand why they appear here, disappear there, why their light... Well, anyway, everything precise that can be said about it. And it's still strange, since we're constantly led to believe that... including even in the world of scholars, they often have a positivist discourse that isn't up to the level of their own science, and an empiricist one in the least defensible sense, because there are excellent senses of empiricism, it's very fruitful.
24:11 You know, measurement is quite strange after all. Because to say this piano is, I'm just saying anything, one meter twenty, is to subject a real object that exists outside of me in empirical reality, which responds to my five senses, and which is... Yes, it's fitting to say, it's a piano that has a shape, a color, whatever we want, it's to subject it to something invented arbitrarily by man called the meter. The meter doesn't exist.
24:41 No, no unit of measurement exists prior to man. Now, we know very well that if I put an electron microscope there at the end of the piano, we'll see there are electrons, well, we'll see, through photos, an electron microscope image, and we'll see that this length doesn't exist in an absolute way, it varies. But we say it measures anyway, because for the use I make of it or that we make of it, an approximation, that's more than enough precision for me.
25:17 I've even gone down to the hundredth of a millimeter, that's fine, no problem. But all these notions, I'm subjecting the real to something that wasn't real, that man introduced by decree. Just as the circle that mathematicians reason about has nothing to do with the ripples in water, which are more or less crude approximations, or the circle I draw with chalk on the blackboard in class or in my notebook.
25:50 Even with the finest compass in the world one could want. But what I mean is that the true circle, the mathematicians' circle, is not a thing, it's a statement. It's a sequence of words. It's a definition. It's the locus of equidistant points. I'm giving the very classical definition, of course, a set-theoretic definition would be different. The locus of points equidistant from a single point called the center, in a single plane. It's a statement. Everything that doesn't contradict this statement, well, I see, for example, we can deduce from it that all the radii of a circle are equal, by definition, so to speak.
26:22 There we go. I'll leave the epistemological part here to show the fruitfulness of Lionel's question, which doesn't yet know how to develop further, but above all, now, since we're at... I'll come back once more to the point, and here I'll take the opportunity to deal with the other two questions, meaning and sign, which revolve around the opposition between meaning and sign. I note that Hugo's question, like Samuel's, addresses the sign-meaning pair more than the cause-effect pair which I had opposed to the sign-meaning pair.
Philosophical imperialism and scientistic imperialism 27:03 I remind you that I had ended the last workshop on this distinction which seems decisive to me. I had started from a double imperialism. In Antiquity, I illustrated it with Aristotle's system, which is exemplary on this point: there is a philosophical imperialism, that is to say philosophy is the discipline that encompasses all the others.
27:33 Because it's the only one that studies being as being, to quote one of the most famous and magnificent passages from Book Four of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and Aristotle says very clearly that all the other sciences carve out a part of being. For example, physics is interested in beings that are in motion. The biologist or the psychologist will be interested in the being that is in motion and that is animate, that has a soul, in short, etc.
28:08 But only the philosopher questions being as being. So there we have it, all the other sciences are only parts of philosophy. And as happens to, I'll go quickly, as happens to every imperialism, it becomes the target of wars of independence. Every colonial imperialism will run into wars of decolonization. And so what had to happen happened: mathematics gained its independence fairly quickly in Euclid's time.
28:41 Right? It took much more time. It's not entirely a coincidence, because there we pass all at once into the real, that physics had to wait for Galileo, roughly speaking. Even if there had been advances with Archimedes. [Sciences] gain their independence, then chemistry, Lavoisier, biology, Claude Bernard, and so on. And it seems like nothing is left for philosophy. It had everything and it's threatened with having nothing left. And we move on to a second imperialism, which is scientistic imperialism.
29:11 There's no more point raising philosophical questions. It's useless, it's old-fashioned, it's outdated. Every question must fall under, must go through the same methods that have succeeded so well in studying the world around us, or earthworms passing by, ironically. I mean, on the contrary, I find that science is too despised in the dominant ideology. It makes use of it. It makes use of it to achieve its ends, always for the benefit of the same people.
29:41 And on the other hand, I mean, it spreads the idea that everything is relative and that nature is unfathomable and that the sciences, in short, are almost dangerous. That's not our problem. Let me get back to scientific imperialism, which is called scientism or positivism. Scientism is not science. The most subtle scholars are very careful not to be scientistic... If every scientific approach must be modeled on, must take as its model the methods that have triumphed in what are now called the hard sciences, natural sciences, exact sciences as they used to be called, which isn't very exact.
30:31 let's say the natural sciences. Because that gives a domain of definition. In any case, that's where they are, where they've most established their domain, by far. So, physics, chemistry, biology. And their dependents. Under physics I include astronomy, astrophysics of course, that is to say, well, biochemistry, it turns out. There's a model that triumphs in these sciences, and rightly so, which has proven itself and continues to prove itself in every laboratory.
31:05 It's the model Y equals F of X. That is, the relation, to put it a bit more laboriously, of functional dependence between one variable and another. Right? Y is a function of X. Y depends on X. The length of a metal rod depends on the temperature of that metal rod. It increases. When the temperature rises, the length increases; when it drops, when we cool it, it decreases. That's why they used to put gaps between rails.
31:35 Otherwise there would have been railway accidents. If both rails expanded, it would create a bump in the rail. So, here we clearly see a model that excludes freedom. There we've taken a step further. Well yes, if I depend on them, if I'm determined, if the Moon's motion is entirely determined by the Earth's mass, by terrestrial attraction, and by other things that are also moving, that fall within the field of universal gravitation, that means the Moon is not free.
Science of the self and freedom: the question "what must I do?" 32:21 It can't suddenly decide to leave the Earth for a change of scenery and go orbit Jupiter instead, just to take a vacation. So if we extend this model like that, including to the question concerning no longer objects but the subject, the self, if there is a science of the self, that means the self is not free. That's what I'm in the process of saying. If there is a science of the self on this model, on this model of the sciences that have triumphed in nature, of Y equals F of X, it's perhaps possible, I'm not even deciding that, but we have to be consistent.
33:02 If the human sciences are done on the model of the natural sciences, which is somewhat what the cognitive sciences do, even if that seems like a play on words to me, in that case, we must stop hearing about human freedom. And so, it's pointless. We philosophers might as well pack it in—not because our domain is outdated, but because it becomes possible, or rather, it becomes moot.
33:32 Because if our object is to answer the question—which has nothing to do with science—the question 'What must I do?' The question of values, not the question 'What can I know?' It was Kant who formulated these questions well, because of the two great domains: theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, philosophy turned toward action. What must I do? Careful, I had insisted strongly, I'm glad this brings me back to the origins, to the very beginning of the course, to what should be at the start of every philosophy course, as long as we haven't seen the specificity of philosophical inquiry.
34:07 We're not properly in philosophy. We're not required to be. But there it is, we have to be consistent. Namely, when I say 'must,' it's used in a very particular sense. Because when I say 'I must eat to live' and 'I must stop at the red light,' you'll agree that's not at all, everyone will agree that's not at all the same sense? In the case of 'I must eat to live,' the verb 'must' is oddly used. To be completely honest, we should say 'I cannot live without eating,' as a living being, moreover.
34:41 'I cannot live without eating' doesn't apply only to man; it's man's animal part that speaks here. Even plants must feed themselves; every living being must suppress the other in order to preserve the same, in order to preserve itself. So here there is a physical necessity—physical, physis, meaning nature in Greek, I remind you. In truth, it's the natural determination that concerns life; that doesn't bother me at all.
35:12 On the other hand, when I said that I must stop at the red light, let no one tell me that's a determination against which I can do nothing. Three in the morning, no cops, no traffic, one shouldn't, one really shouldn't do it—I always understand that one holds back, and suddenly a motorcycle appears at 250 km/h with a 16-year-old kid without a helmet. And someone who wants to speed, a kid or a madman or a drunk, and it's a catastrophe.
35:42 But still, I can run the red light; I cannot live without eating. So it's only in the second case that I must respect the red light—that is, where I'm not compelled by physical necessity, where I can deviate from the law. In other words, freedom is preserved, not excluded. It's only there that philosophy has a domain of its own, in the questions that respond—sorry, in the discourses that attempt, with more or less success, to answer the question of what I must do when I have the freedom to do this or its opposite.
36:24 Arriving at the crossroads, must I go left or right? I have the possibility of doing either. Should I end the life of a relative who is suffering from an incurable illness and suffering terribly? Well, that's not a scientific question. I'm very grateful to science, to the scientist in this case—not to medicine, which is not a science, but to an art that relies, that only became effective as an art since it relies on a science, namely biology, of course. Before that, it was rituals.
36:57 But I'm very grateful to those who try to keep the person alive. But the greatest of doctors did not study in order to settle the question of whether he should end the life of a relative or a loved one, or let them live as long as they can be kept alive, under medical assistance. That's where we see the specificity of values.
37:31 And in 500 years, the question will still be asked: should I end my relative's suffering? I might be just as incapable and just as perplexed to answer as I am today. I don't have the answer, myself. There are days when I tell myself the suffering must be shortened, other days when I ask myself whether I have the right to decide that the suffering has gone on long enough. I don't know. So I can neither demonize nor deify someone who acts one way or the other. I respect that. Now we clearly see the difference between values, don't we?
38:04 The question about values, what must I do, and the question about knowledge, about knowing. In short, between the true-false pair, that's science. And the good-evil pair, which has nothing to do with it. The question 'what must I do' must remind me that I must choose the good; the way I answer the question of what I must do, everything that goes in the direction of my answer goes in the direction of what will be, for me, the good, and everything contrary will go toward evil. There. So I'd like to finish, because it might seem we've strayed from the problem of definition, when in fact we're right at its heart.
The picnic table: defining by function 38:43 And so, I come back here to my picnic table. Those who followed the workshop last year remember what this is about. We're going to definitively settle the problem of definition in general. You'll notice, by the way, that I'll drag out the pleasure a little, that 'definition' and 'determination' say the same thing. Finished, done—they mean the same thing. When you prefix with 'de-,' it means 'from' in English. It's what is bounded starting from something else that is external.
39:16 All right, let's go now. Why the picnic table? Because—what do we call a table? I'm moving now to the application of the distinctions I just made. Answer: it's a rectangular wooden object with four legs. Come now. We've seen round tables. It's not the shape. We've seen tables made of wood, stone, metal, gold even, that can happen, for some people. Ivory, paper, when they're multiplication tables.
39:46 Right? Ah shoot, if it's not the shape, if it's not the material, the table has vanished. The word is still there, but the thing has flown away. That's rather annoying. Well then, our picnic will help us solve the problem. Why? Because, because, we're in the middle of picnicking, I'm looking for a rock that will let me slice the sausage or dish out the plates for the couscous—depends on the season and everyone's tastes.
40:18 I love both. And I choose a rock a bit flatter than the others and I suddenly notice, and I say, 'Hey friends, this will be our table.' And no one will contradict me. In other words, the table—this rock which had never asked to be called a table—before a human decision made by a speaking being, a sovereign and arbitrary decision, decrees, as God gave Adam the power to name the creatures in the Old Testament, 'this will be our table.'
40:57 A table is a function. That's why you can't find it with your eyes by looking to see if it has four legs or one leg. Bistro tables often have only one leg, they're round. As long as it fulfills the same function, that you can write, eat, have a drink on it, that it's fairly stable, that you can set objects on it—that's a table. It's what corresponds to that function; in other words, it's in the head—when I say the head, in the guts too—it's in a subject's intention before it's an existence in an object.
Form, end, and meaning: from eidos to Aristotle's axe 41:29 That's why empiricism never manages to define these things, isn't it? There you go. This sovereign decree brings me to Samuel's and Hugo's questions, because suddenly I notice that the table is not caught in the endless chain of causes and effects. It doesn't escape it, though. The wood I use, if it's a wooden table, the wood I use comes from a whole causal chain that made a forest grow, trees, of course.
42:02 But that doesn't give you a table, it gives you wood. For there to be a table, this matter must also acquire a form. That's where we move on to meaning, to sign. We can feel it, we're starting to sense it. The object will signal to me through its shape. And I'll say, 'oh, I like this table.' I'll remind you that form is said 'eidos' in Greek, which is translated as 'idea' in Plato and as 'form' in Aristotle.
42:36 It's been that way for 2000 years. It's the same word in the text. Right? And we find the visual connotation again, even though when we say 'the idea' in Plato, it's anything but visual. A student would get zero if he believed that the idea is what we see. No, no, the idea is what we can never see, it's what we can conceive. Right? But never see. I was talking about the mathematicians' circle earlier—there you go, it's something I can conceive, state, but never see. Even if I can see ripples in water. So form always has a visual connotation, meaning that the word which, even in Plato, means what is transcendent to everything visible, originates from something expressing a visible outline.
43:21 That's quite extraordinary, still. You find it again in French with the suffix '-oid.' What does 'anthropoid ape' mean? As with the orangutan, the gorilla, the chimpanzee—apes that have the appearance, the form, the look of man. Anthropoid. There you go. And when a severe alcoholic has an epileptic seizure, unfortunately that happens.
43:53 To distinguish it from an epileptic, who can be epileptic without ever having drunk a drop of alcohol, we say 'he has an epileptoid syndrome.' That is, it recalls that it has the same appearance as the seizures of an epileptic. So here I want to point out that the form in which finality is expressed—the form of the table expresses finality, the function the object in question must serve.
44:25 Aristotle goes so far as to say that if axes hung from trees, if they weren't made by man but were like fruit, if they grew at the end of tree branches, their cutting edge, the sharpened aspect of the blade, would be their soul. Their form indicates their meaning. Do you see how we arrive at meaning? Only that which points to an end has a meaning. And we can feel this a little.
44:56 When I see—when I say the word 'meaning' [sens], everyone more or less has an arrow in their head. Have you found the meaning/direction? 'Sens' means a direction, a way. Which way—do I go left or right? You see, it's an arrow that points each time. So it's not a straight line just like that, it's an oriented line. Now, as soon as I have a finality, I imply one direction to the detriment of another. If my goal is to get to an appointment at the opera, that implies means, a route, etc.
45:30 Right away, that introduces a hierarchy into space and time. It gives meaning to what I'm doing. Why do I go that way rather than this way? And every millimeter I travel to get closer to the goal I've set myself brings me closer to fulfilling the function and the finality. It's a finalized journey. So the notions of form, end, function, meaning, soul—before falling into superstitions, and here I'm thinking of Plato mocking Crito in the Phaedo—no, not Crito, sorry, Simmias or the other one, one of the two, Simmias and Cebes I believe—who have doubts about his demonstration of the immortality of the soul and who say to Socrates, 'I'm not really convinced, I can't help thinking that at my death my soul will evaporate at the first gust of wind.'
46:37 Socrates says, I'll start the demonstration over again, but first, let's say a prayer to Aeolus so there's no wind on the day of your death. It's a way of being ironic, of saying: obviously, if you start out by saying that the soul is something material, just a somewhat less visible matter—since wind is very material, just as the air that carries my voice to a listener's ears is very material too—well, just as the end could not be carried out if it had no matter through which to come into existence, one must not confuse this matter with the end, which is expressed through its form and which comes from a goal, from something a subject has set for itself.
47:36 In other words, for there to be an end, a meaning, there must be a universe where there is someone, and not merely something. There are some-ones. That's what a subject is. Maybe it's illusory, that's possible, but if there's no subject, there's no end, there's no meaning. And if we say there's no meaning, like those who would like history to have no meaning—that suits capitalism just fine—there's no progress, there's no meaning.
48:06 There's nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes says. In that case, there is no subject. And you can treat anyone as a something. But you have to accept the consequences. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So, I've shown the mutual implication of notions, whether or not they exist in the last instance. That's a different debate about end, form, meaning, and therefore sign.
48:39 Because just as the end can be recognized in the form — I come back to Aristotle's phrase — if the cutting edge of the axe, the tapered shape of the blade, expresses the function I've assigned to it, to help me cut trees or logs, in the same way, the sign, isn't that so? The sign gives an existence to meaning. Meaning could not be conveyed if the sign weren't there to give it a material substrate.
49:14 That's what I wanted to recall. And I'll finish by saying that the important point of what I was saying at the end of the lecture wasn't the sign-meaning relationship itself, it was the relationship between the sign-meaning opposition, which defines the field of what the human sciences, research in the human sciences, should be, whereas the cause-effect pair defines the vast domain of the — the two have no assignable limit — the so-called hard sciences, or what I prefer simply to call the sciences of nature.
Kant: legislation by nature and legislation by freedom 49:49 And when Samuel says there's no... Yes, let me go back. So I've overcome the two imperialisms, right? There was philosophical imperialism, there was scientistic imperialism — I'm summarizing now — and I said, continuing my political metaphors, peaceful coexistence between sciences and philosophy, each to its own domain, peaceful coexistence. And there I was no doubt quoting the most profound text of Kant — well, where the stakes are the highest, philosophically speaking at least; for the others I'm not competent to judge — in his last work, a more comprehensive work that sums up the whole critical enterprise, the Critique of Judgment, or of the faculty of judging, depending on the translation, in the introduction to which he sums up everything we've just said by saying: the set of objects that we can know can be divided into two domains, according to the legislations that operate within them.
50:53 I'll recall in a moment that there was science, that wherever there were laws — to legislate is to bring laws into play. There is the domain of legislation by the concept of nature. That sums up everything we've just said. The moon revolves around the Earth by virtue of a legislation that belongs to the natural domain. On the other hand, there is a legislation by freedom. I gave the example earlier of the red light that I can run.
51:26 That legislation, we're not obliged to comply with it, or rather we have a moral obligation to. It's not a physical necessity. There you go. Since there will be other questions, maybe on these three points — I wouldn't want to go on indefinitely — but I made use of Kant, and I grant that Samuel is right that Kant doesn't put it in these exact words. He doesn't say, he says "legislation by nature and legislation by freedom." But he doesn't add it, even though his whole work amounts to a reflection — his work concerning legislation by nature, this debate with the concept of causality — almost the entire Critique of Pure Reason is a settling of accounts with the concept of causality, which he ends up saying is a metaphysical concept.
52:14 Strangely, the concept that governs the sciences of nature is a metaphysical concept. What the reintroduction of chance — but I wouldn't want to get into certain ramblings of philosophers, of pseudo-philosophers of science. Alright, I'll say it anyway: there are those who use the appearance of quantum theory as a pretext to say "the revenge of chance, the collapse of determinism." That's political. It's ideological, and the person saying it isn't always aware of it.
52:44 He thinks he's engaged in a scientific debate. These notions aren't scientific — chance and necessity. That's the title of a famous book that sought to ruin Marxism in the 1960s, without quoting a single word of Marx, a judgment made instead by a human being, as it's called — made by an excellent biologist, but I mean, a biologist who has the competence to know whether you should euthanize your sick grandmother. And I'll appeal here, to sum up the essential point, to quantum theory.
53:25 It's been said that chance has come back, but no, it's almost the opposite. With measurements, with the finesse of quantum mechanics, one can introduce a predictability far finer than the mechanics that existed before. So chance has actually been pushed back a bit further with quantum mechanics. There you go. It's not my field, but I'm warning here against those who take equations to which I...
Marx, ideology, and productive forces / relations of production 53:56 It's not my field... into everyday language. And then they say that everyday language, natural language, isn't their field either — that's for the linguists. Are there other questions, Philippe? So, yes. I copied them for you in the comments on your Skype. Yes. Please. So I'll start with the last one. I'm sorry. Well, there are three very long ones and then an excerpt, again, that I'll copy for you if I haven't already.
54:29 So, I'll read you the last question, which was asked by Ibra Gaye. Yes. I salute Ibra Gaye, who is a friend and comrade from Senegal, who is quite courageous because things are difficult south of the Sahara — everywhere, you'll tell me. I renew my friendship and my admiration for him. So he says, Marx criticizes bourgeois political economy, which claims to be scientific. You often say that economics is measurable and intervenes in the last instance.
55:02 How do we articulate the mechanisms, especially economic ones, and the teleology proper to a subject? In short, can we reduce economics to the productive forces and treat it as mere mechanics, and treat social relations as the locus of the social bond and of politics, in order to answer the question of who owns the productive forces? My question is this. Is economic policy, liberal or Keynesian or otherwise, enough to characterize a political regime?
55:37 How do we articulate all of this, namely mechanisms and ends, and economics? And he finishes — he made another small comment — to which field does political economy belong? Well, first, a superb question, which contains many questions, but he's entirely right, first of all in terms of historical accuracy, when we go back to the texts, to say that Marx criticizes bourgeois political economy's claim — since it's the bourgeoisie that founded the discipline — its claim to be an autonomous science, alongside physics, chemistry, etc.
56:22 but there was also talk of social physics at one time. People also spoke of economic sciences, what were called the physiocrats, in the eighteenth century, yes. Marx classes bourgeois economic theories under what he calls, with a generic term, ideology. Now, let's not start thinking that when Marx says ideology, that means it's just daydreaming.
56:52 No, no, no, no, no. Ideology is very important. To sum it up, in the text where Marx best situates ideology in relation to knowledge — I say knowledge to have a somewhat broader term than science, but it's the same word: "ich weiß" in German means "I know," and science is "Wissenschaft." There you go. "Wise" — "sage" in English. And the terms are often conflated in everyday usage. When we say, look, that fellow knows a lot of things, he's a sage, we're conflating knowledge and wisdom a bit; it's not too serious at that level.
57:27 We'll say, for example, of a peasant who knows the properties of plants and knows which mushrooms should be picked and which should be left alone — we'll say he has great wisdom. We're conflating knowledge and action there, and it's not too serious at that level. Yes, in Marx, it's said in the famous 1859 preface, precisely, to his "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," as it's titled. It's not that Marxism is one more economics — a revolutionary one — that would come to sit alongside the reactionary bourgeois economics.
58:02 That's not it. No. It's not an economism. Credit must be given to Althusser for having insisted that Marxism is not an economism, even if he went a bit too far in the opposite direction. And Ibra Gaye is right to bring in the quintessentially Marxist pairing of the relationship between the productive forces and the relations of production. I have to move a bit quickly because you can't redefine everything from scratch, but while the productive forces are a purely economic notion — the plow at one time, farming, the workshop, the tractor are different productive forces that of course give rise to very different economic systems.
58:50 You understand clearly. Whereas the relations of production add a political dimension that owes nothing to economics. Because depending on whether the plow or the tractor belongs to a single person who does what he wants with it and can rent it out to others at whatever price he wants, or whether it has a collective use in a cooperative, for example, that doesn't give rise to the same relations of production at all. In other words, the relations of production bring into question — and Ibra defined this very well — the property relations within which the productive forces are inscribed.
59:28 The productive forces don't just start functioning on their own. They function for the benefit of an owner. Whether that owner is private or public — I'll take the example of dams, since ours have just been stolen from us. It seems our dams are going to be privatized, even those are going to be sold off. That was one of France's assets, the Alps and the Pyrenees. It's a tragedy for Germany not to have mountain ranges.
59:58 We have that — condemned to coal, polluting things that amount to the same. As for England, I won't even get into it. It's precious to have mountains. Countries like Norway and Switzerland have abundant electric power and much cheaper prices. And there you have it: hydroelectric plants, thanks to the taxes of the community that helped design them, do the studies, build them, pay those who designed them and those who built them with their hands. All it takes is one price hike, it's like with the highways.
1:00:36 The investment is public, and once it's profitable, it's handed over to a private company that just has to put a meter upstream. Cha-ching! And I cash in. Every clunk of the meter, not bad, like jars of jam going through a packing machine. There you have it, that's a relation of production. The same productive forces do not produce the same world — that's where you see it doesn't reduce to economics, and certainly not to economism, depending on whether they belong to a group, a community, a cooperative, or whether they're subject to the arbitrariness of private ownership of capital.
Rousseau, social determinism, and freedom; conclusion 1:01:12 Private property means "I deprive you" of the use one could make of it and the benefits one could draw from it. There you go, roughly speaking. So, the word mechanism came up often in Ibra's question — I'll get to what's in his question. Marxism is anything but a mechanism. And there, Marx — while he criticized certain still somewhat naive aspects of Rousseau, who came a bit too early to think through the industrial revolution then underway, it was a bit early for Rousseau — nonetheless admired Rousseau's political thought.
1:01:54 What am I alluding to? Directly to Ibra's question. Namely, when Rousseau, in Emile, says to the mother of his pupil: "Everything that men have made, men can destroy. Nothing is ineffaceable except what nature imprints, and nature makes neither princes, nor rich men, nor lords." It's a text that begins with this rather prophetic phrase for the time when he wrote it, isn't it?
1:02:24 I've already repeated this. I apologize to those who have already heard it. We are approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions. But the current context obliges me to dwell a little on this Rousseau. He wrote this, mind you, in 1765, and he senses whether there won't be a revolution. It's the century of revolutions. There are revolutions that won't stop. We had thought it was over, that France had settled down, that it had become German, Anglo-Saxon, that the French no longer grumbled.
1:02:56 They're made to believe they're consuming, because there are those who say they're consuming — no, they're not consuming as much anymore, they find they're not consuming. And they're quite right. It's their business if they consume too much or too little. I say this because I heard the head of state today dare to say that there are too many people in France who believe they can get what they want without effort. But how can such a whippersnapper demand effort from those with gray hair by the braziers and on the roundabouts, who have fifty years of hard labor behind them, who have worn out their hands, their brains, and their skills — really, these are obscene assertions.
1:03:39 There you go. Productive forces, relations of production. The productive forces are economic, material; the relations of production are a form, no longer just a matter — they're property relations. It's the system of property within which the productive forces are inscribed. It's complex — look at intellectual property in the internet age, all that — I mean, one can work, one must work on these concepts. But the decisive point lies there, in this distinction between what advances the material side of things — I'm more productive with a tractor than with a plow, that's true.
1:04:21 I'm not saying it's better or worse, I'm talking about magnitude, it's quantitative. I'll produce more grain per unit of land per unit of time, and moreover with less effort and less fatigue. But I mean, that doesn't define the political system within which this takes place. For that, you need to know who owns these productive forces — not forgetting that the earth itself is already a productive force. Because here I'm going to be an ecologist, for once, I mean, in the most defensible sense — if it were always in that sense that people talked about ecology, I'd be ecological all day long.
1:04:55 Ecological, that is, as Marx says very well, until further notice we haven't managed to fish fish out of waters where there weren't any. So the earth, the sea, are also productive forces. There you go. Potential numbers. So I reassure right away — but I know Ibra probably shares this concern, it's in the direction his fight is going — that there is a determinism in the human sciences, just as there is in the sciences of nature.
1:05:26 But it's not at all the same kind. I come back to: I must eat to live, and I must obey the red light. There is indeed a "must" in both cases. I must submit, in both cases, to a law. But in the first case, to a law I can never escape — I must eat to live, or I cannot live without eating. Duty has nothing to do with it here. And in the case of the red light, which is not incompatible with my freedom. So, enough of those who believe that Marxism is an implacable determinism, which shows how little regard these people — the revolutionaries — supposedly have for freedom.
1:06:01 This said by those who crush peoples under carpets of bombs. I mean, I won't recite the whole litany — three million dead in Korea, that's nothing serious. I mean, three million dead in Vietnam, mere trifles, not serious. Just "lemon faces." And yes, when I was a kid, I used to read the Buck Danny aviation stories, you know, the American pilots during the war against the Japanese — they called the Japanese "lemon faces." They didn't terrorize the world with political correctness back then, they were less clever than now.
1:06:34 So, I don't hate on Americans, you know, I hate on Atlanticism. There are admirable Americans who fight against Atlanticism. And conversely, there are French and Italians who are hyper-Atlanticist. I don't know who else — the Czechs, the Croats — and currently it's especially the Estonians and the Ukrainians. The neo-Nazis in Ukraine are the most Atlanticist in the region, for example. Well, there, I'll stop there because Ibra is... I know I'll never convince from there on.
1:07:04 And... Because he also has to fight against the World Bank in his country, I mean, and the IMF and other structural adjustment plans. I salute him in passing and thank him for his question. Well, listen, Dominique, since it's getting a bit late, I'm going to... I'll pass along to you the other questions that were asked. There's a question from Kev Roussel. Yes. From Thibault Olivier. Yes. They're a bit long.
1:07:34 There you go. So I'll pass them on to you. Well, I'm sorry that you... you brought up dams without... Before you ask the question, how should we handle answering it in a second session? Listen, it's up to you to tell me. If you want to continue now, I can... No, I don't want to. I don't want to abuse the time of those who kindly listen, and your time. Either way, we could very easily meet again in a few days and do the rest of the answers, we could do the rest of this conversation.
1:08:06 OK. Tell me the question anyway, I'll have time to think about it. Do you want me to read it to you now, or send it to you? Or you send it to me. There you go, that's fine. That way I'll have time afterward to prepare a proper answer. There you go. And, well, I have one little personal regret. There, you talked about the dam without... You're not going to talk about the salmon? No, without giving us the text, the poem, that you regularly mention, the Rimbaud poem.
1:08:36 Ah yes, yes, the questions about the dam. Yes, there, I said to myself, ah, we're going to get a Rimbaldian breather. And well, anyway, it's just for the little anecdote. Listen, we'll decide on another evening and we'll announce it on Facebook. I recommend everyone read it. It's half a page. Honestly, it won't take you much time. One of the most beautiful poems there is, a prose poem in Rimbaud's Illuminations called "Mouvement," in the singular.
1:09:06 There you go. Thank you, Philippe. Well, thank you too. And thanks to everyone who was here this evening, who keep in touch about the next one. I'll take the opportunity, since it's not too late, to wish them the best year, a better year than all those that came before. There you go. At least a better one. Thank you, Dominique. Thank you, Philippe.
