English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Announcements and why say "sciences of the subject" 0:30 Thank you Philippe, and thank you all for being faithful to our meeting. So this is my first live session in 15 days, since that's our new schedule. Let me take advantage of this, even though it doesn't quite concern our site, or even our association, but I know that many of you also follow that other series, and I had the pleasure of speaking with Aymeric Monville on the phone this morning, who is back from school holidays with the children in the provinces, and who told me that we're resuming our next Musicosophie session starting next Monday, still at the same early morning times.
1:22 But at a rate of one session per week rather than two per week, that's the clarification. Another small preliminary clarification: I have a small technical problem — my main computer is currently broken, but it's being repaired, thanks to one of you actually, and it will be given back to me on Friday. So right now I'm using my tablet, which has a bit of a charging issue. In principle we shouldn't have too many problems, but just in case, if worst comes to worst, there were a power cut, don't worry, stay tuned.
2:00 With Philippe we're going to switch very quickly from Skype to Zoom — well, let's say we'll get back to you as soon as possible. That said, this is still a hypothesis that's only weakly supported for now. So, since we're now working in alternation, aren't we, sometimes the ring, sometimes back to epistemology strictly speaking — well, I say epistemology to refer to familiar disciplines, but actually it's epistemology with a question mark, because the very principle of epistemology is philosophical reflection on the sciences. And here we are asking about mathematics, physics, astrophysics, biology, whatever. And here we are reflecting on discourses that we wonder how they can constitute a science. Under what conditions?
3:08 So, you'll have noticed that in the outline we sent you on our Facebook page, I said: return to reflection on the sciences of the subject. Now, I know some of you — women too — worry sometimes that things get complicated and hard to follow. Well, we had understood it was the sciences of history, so why is he now saying sciences of the subject? Let me say, to make things easier, don't fall into false complications — I'm showing you that one serves as a joker for the other. The sciences of the subject, or the sciences of history, or the sciences of culture if you prefer, if you're more anthropological than Marxist, why not? In any case, this stands opposed to the so-called hard sciences and especially to the sciences of nature, doesn't it? We recalled last time that the two sets don't quite overlap, because within the hard sciences there is the hardest of all, mathematics — not hardest in the sense of most difficult. Let me open a small parenthesis. Mathematics is the science of the simple.
4:13 I don't mean it's the easy science, but it's the science of the simple, of the unmixed, in the sense of simple bodies in chemistry, doesn't it? When water is only H2O, with no trace of lemon juice in it. It's a simple body, as opposed to a compound, if you like. Well, in mathematics, the mathematical object is mixed with nothing external. But as soon as mathematics is applied to an external object — to exchanges between atoms, to chemistry, to the time light takes to reach us from the most distant galaxies —
5:02 Well, then we're no longer in the realm of the simple. There, that's a small reminder. So, the hard sciences, let's be clear, form a set that brings together, in the mathematical sense, indeed in the set-theoretic sense — we don't want to leave anything out — the sciences of nature and the mathematical sciences. When I say I'm making a return to the sciences of the subject, instead of saying here the sciences of history, first let me recall that these are things we've already seen, so I won't re-establish them each time, will I?
5:43 Sometimes they need to be demonstrated, sometimes they need to be taken as a result, as a stepping stone, from which we try to climb to the step above all the same. But since some of you are jumping on the moving train, let me take the opportunity to recall here, without too lengthy a demonstration, that when I say sciences of the subject, the notion of subject — which I'll come back to very often, don't worry. For now let's retain that it's what stands opposite the object, for now.
6:13 Or else, remember, I did a whole series on this, the logic of the subject, didn't I? I had said, if you're lost when we talk about the subject, the best thing is to go back to primary school and remember what your teacher, male or female, used to say: the subject is what answers the question 'who,' isn't it? There. So, the subject — why are the sciences of the subject and the sciences of history equivalent, I'm getting there, in my preliminaries and my introduction — because we now know among ourselves that it is in the course of history, via history, via the enormous labor, the patience of the concept, to speak in Hegelian terms, of praxis, to speak in more Marxist terms.
7:02 It's via activity, the process of production, as one would say in Marx. It's through this that man, who until then belonged to an animal species like the others, suddenly becomes a subject. And so, let me recall why I preferred to say science of the subject today rather than historical science, to point out that historical sciences, at the center of which is of course man, so it's the tool of the human sciences — the essential thing is that these different names cover the same sets, the same classes of reality.
Comprehension and extension 7:44 That's where you can see whether a notion is operative or not, isn't it? Let me offer a small clarification here — it's not a digression, we're staying on the same subject, nor a detour. But you see, here we find again a very important dichotomy in logic, in general logic, which is the dichotomy of comprehension and extension. First let me speak abstractly, then we'll give examples, but comprehension is the set of predicates that I can attribute to a subject.
8:24 So let's take any subject, X is — isn't it? So X is the subject, the cat is a mammal, here X is the cat. Let's take a subject, X is — that's what's called the copula, isn't it? It's not an action verb as you know, as you were taught in grammar. Yes, primary school again — it's a stative verb, and it's thanks to this verb that the subject won't be alone, but will soon be, isn't it, associated, coupled — hence the copula — with an object, isn't it?
9:00 There. So, the set of predicates is everything to the right of the verb 'to be.' The cat is a mammal, it's nice, it's cuddly, it's lazy, it's sly, I don't know, and it's fond of stuffed mice — I say that because mine spends its time shredding a stuffed one, with delight — and so on.
9:33 The set of predicates that can be applied to a subject gives the comprehension of that subject, it's not complicated. Extension is exactly the opposite: it's the set of subjects to which a given predicate applies. For example, 'student in the senior class B4' — I'm making this up — or S2, has an extension of 32 if there are 32 students, you see, it's the number of subjects to which a certain predicate applies.
10:04 So there you have it, extension and comprehension. And now let's vary — as in mathematical analysis — let's vary these notions rigorously. You can well imagine that the more general a notion is, the greater its extension. I said 'a cat.' There are already quite a few of them. The colors can vary, the size, whatever you like, the species, the family, it can come from Asia, and so on.
10:37 Well, maybe wild, domestic, whatever. It's a vast set, yes. Still less than mammals though. So we'll say that 'mammal' has more extension than 'cat,' doesn't it? And that's all, well— No, let's continue before saying that's all, before posing an interesting problem. But let's see if we've understood correctly. If we push it — that is, the variation — to infinity, if I take a word that expresses something that can apply to practically everything, 'thing,' for example, that's something that, isn't it—
11:13 So, that can apply to a galaxy, to a pinhead, can't it? Almost to God. Well, it would rather be 'someone' now, there. Isn't it? And still, there are those who have a conception of God that would be 'something,' substance. And so, the more extension a notion has, the poorer its comprehension. Because if you ask me what Schubert is, and I answer, he's someone—
11:45 'Someone' — that can apply to billions of individuals, but I haven't told you much about Schubert. So, you've understood today that the extension and comprehension of fundamental notions in logic are inversely proportional to one another. So, why did I make this detour? Because, as I told you earlier, it doesn't matter whether we say science of nature, social science for now between us, science of the subject, science of history — a formula I find the most precise, the most appropriate, let's say, but I'm not imposing it — as long as, for now, it's plural.
12:23 The sciences of history, because, as I told you, they apply to roughly the same — they have roughly the same extension. A specialist in the history of sub-Saharan Africa will belong to the discipline. We call that the sciences of history or the human sciences, you see, or the sciences of culture — if he's a specialist in the history of sub-Saharan Africa, you can imagine we're not going to talk here about the geology of sub-Saharan Africa, except just briefly in an introductory framework, as we always do, to introduce a human presence.
Mathematics reasons in extension; the Organon 13:06 So there you go, that's why I made this long detour through extension and comprehension, which I'll now finish so we understand what's at stake. And afterward, I'll come back more precisely to our subject on the sciences of nature and the human sciences. Sciences of nature and human sciences — one of the strengths of the hard sciences, and in particular of the use they make of mathematics, is, let's say, what they perhaps draw as most precious from mathematics.
13:42 So don't just say vague words like rigor and such — of course, that goes without saying — no, more precisely, it's that mathematics reasons in extension. It doesn't waste too much time trying to reason in comprehension. It's the exact opposite of the 'what do you call' question. You see? Philosophy begins with the question 'what do you call.' We saw that Socrates, that's how he initiates philosophy in the streets of Athens. By saying not 'what is it' but much more radically, more fundamentally, even before we know whether it exists, whether being is given or not — what do you call it?
14:20 Addressing the one supposedly in the know. I asked the most fashionable sculptor in Athens — so tell me, since you know about beautiful things, what is beauty? What do you call beauty? More radically than 'what is it' — what do you call beauty? Philosophy begins with a question aimed at comprehension. What will answer 'beauty is such and such,' and there, we'll get a certain number of predicates.
14:50 Whereas mathematics begins by saying 'I call this a circle,' and bang, there's a definition. It doesn't waste time with comprehension. It goes immediately to formulations that give it considerable extension. Let me give you a more precise, more mathematical example. It's when, even at the secondary level, what I'm about to say is understandable, when we do what's called the partition of a set.
15:24 That is, we analyze all the subsets it contains in an orderly way, if you prefer. I took the whole set of the senior S2 class. We can already distinguish the subset of boys and girls, can't we? There, those who have this, those who don't. Well, I mean, we can make all sorts of subsets.
15:56 Those who have a passing grade and those who don't, etc. Mathematicians start right away. The first part they set aside is the empty set. The empty set is contained in the reference set. We start with that... You see, so as to leave nothing to chance, to extend the notion of 'part' to as many possibilities as possible. That's the strength of mathematics. There, my little parenthesis on the notion, on the extension-comprehension pair.
16:31 Remember it, because tools are made to be used. You know, I told you these two terms are borrowed from general logic. Aristotle's work begins with logic. Beginners, first year if you prefer, under Aristotle, went to what was called, at the time, the class of the Organon. Logic was called the Organon. That means, the place where one learns — the tools. It means organ too, well... In both cases they're bearers of functions.
17:01 Organs like tools. There. The Organon — that's the tools. Those who are in vocational training classes — now I'm moving into professional education. I'm a bit old, so maybe the names have changed, haven't they? Not always for the better these days, but anyway... We know very well that before learning to use a file, for instance, isn't it? In a workshop, we're going to file down a piece of iron with a file, a piece of iron well clamped, well tightened in a vise.
17:37 You first learn to use the file before making an object. You learn to use the tools before making an object. Oh! Oh! What does this have to do with logic? Here it is! Before doing zoology, geology. You see? Futurology, some do that too. You see? -Logy. So, everywhere there's -logy, we're told, science, geology, science of the Earth. Well, yes...
18:07 Speaking loosely, that can pass, but... Exactly, if you translate the Greek, logos, as you well know — monologue, dialogue — it's speech, language. It means discourse on the Earth. And in principle, a discourse unlike others, a well-founded discourse, a scientific discourse. Discourse on the Earth, geology. Musicology, discourse on music. On music. I don't know. Science, science of music, that amounts to the same thing.
18:37 All sciences express themselves in the form of statements. So, that amounts to the same thing. So, before doing whatever-logy, one must first work on the tool we use in all these disciplines, which is language. And that's why beginners, under Aristotle, started with the discipline where one doesn't yet study something applied, but rather what will apply to everything: logic. There, to finish with that project. Well, precisely, let's stay in antiquity, because I'd like — you've seen our outline — I used, well it's debatable, but I used a metaphor, a metaphor borrowed from geopolitics, that of imperialism.
Philosophy and wisdoms; the Athenian school 19:21 You'll see very quickly why. But what matters to me, the subject that will occupy us here, is the relationship of the sciences to philosophy, the relationship of the sciences in general — whether hard, mathematical, applied, pure, simple, compound, whatever you like — to philosophy. But this time from a diachronic point of view, that is, unfolded within history, how the relationships of the sciences to philosophy will evolve.
19:53 And here, why do I take this metaphor of imperialism? Because we were with Aristotle — let's stay there, let's stay with philosophy strictly speaking, not the history of thought, I won't repeat this a thousand times. There are Hindu and Chinese thoughts of unfathomable depth, well before Socrates spoke in the streets of Athens, but these are not philosophies.
20:23 Sometimes they border on the religious, whatever you like — they are not... they are wisdoms. There are books of Chinese philosophy, quote unquote, ancient Chinese philosophy — I was looking at one a long time ago, and I was surprised to find fifteen pages on how to drink tea. How many people first? Beyond four, it's the 'bine' — if they don't want, the Chinese say it's not good, so there mustn't be more than four. Two is conflictual. Three, there'd be two against one, so four, they say, is good.
20:55 With what water? Because there's a hierarchy — there's mountain water, spring water, well water. You see, we're not asking ourselves questions here, we're being given answers to all these questions. Which water should one choose? These are wisdoms. This is not the philosophical search — philosophia — for wisdom. The love of it, hence the desire for it, hence the search for it. The money I desire is not the money I have in my pocket, it's the money I don't have. So, one cannot be both a philosopher and, I don't know, a sage and a sophist.
21:25 I'm playing on the word on purpose. So, there were great schools of wisdom. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a marvel. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is even older too, is what was whispered into the dying person's ear, to guide them through the maze that would allow them, if they listened well to what they were told, to pass from this earthly life to the most advantageous reincarnation possible. Of which I'll only say one more thing, just to encourage you to look it up — the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol, isn't it?
22:01 At a certain moment, the most dangerous one, it's the first seconds, isn't it, of death. The monks say into the dying person's ear: careful, you are now in the presence of the light, of eternity. Understand? This instant is as brief as that of a needle balanced on a thread. There, I just wanted to tell you that magnificent image, didn't I? Try to hold, isn't it, on that thread. So there, this is a value judgment, when I say that everything that begins, strictly speaking, in Greece — I'm not being Eurocentric.
22:34 I mean, that's what's called, strictly speaking — maybe it's a fall compared to that, who knows. But in any case, the 'what do you call' question, a radical question, which no longer bears on things — what is God, what is the good conduct of life, what is the good — but on the words by which we designate these things. What do you call it? There, this philosophy, then, which begins in the streets of Athens with Socrates, who has as a pupil Plato, who will record quite a few of his master's statements while adding his own magnificent talent as a stage director.
23:07 How many times have I told you that he is the greatest artist, barely contested, in the history of philosophical writing. It's a shame he didn't exist in his own time — he would have handled a camera so well, that one. And so, that's it, because in Hegel — I mean Plato — there are prologues, intermezzos, epilogues like that, delightful. And very vivid, very rich, very concrete and very narrative.
23:37 So, I'm thinking in particular of the Symposium, when we get to the end of the banquet, when the discussion on the beautiful and on Eros is finished, and Alcibiades arrives, carried in by flute-playing women, completely drunk, with ivy leaves around his head like that. Well, Plato leaves us the first written system — he has as a pupil, well, Socrates has a disciple, Plato, there are several, Plato — Plato has a disciple, Aristotle, who will stay 30 years at his school.
24:09 So, there are great differences between Plato and Aristotle, whatever you like, and no doubt between Plato and Socrates there are nuances, sometimes a bit more, but all that is still the Athenian school, isn't it? They have the same opponents, the sophists, who say that the search for wisdom is useless. Either one is dogmatic — that is, 'I know what beauty is, there, I'm a sculptor, you're not going to fool me,' so no need to search for it — or there's the skeptic who says there's no need to search for it either, because beauty doesn't exist, it's relative.
Metaphysics, book Gamma: the science of being as being 24:39 So, you see, neither one nor the other — for Plato and Aristotle, what matters to them is the search itself. And so, I start from Aristotle to begin this great unfolding of the relations between science and philosophy. Because Aristotle approaches this problem in the most solemn way possible. In the fourth book — there are three before it — he takes his time in his Metaphysics. Metaphysics, he says these are chapters, but some people are frightened when they learn there are twelve books, I'm making up the number, aren't I.
25:16 Just as there are ten books in Plato's Republic, some might say, well, that's ten chapters. Now here, in Book IV, since they're numbered with Greek letters, Book Gamma, G if you prefer, suddenly this Book Gamma opens with a first sentence. Up to that point, Aristotle had been compiling the opinions of his predecessors on this notion of first philosophy, because it wasn't called metaphysics yet.
25:52 It was called first philosophy, the search for the foundations, the principles that underlie all reflection. And the name lasted a long time, since when you look at the title of Descartes' most important work, alongside the Discourse on Method, the Meditations on First Philosophy, which is written in Latin — the Discourse on Method, for political reasons Descartes wanted, so as to reach the widest audience, was published in French.
26:22 The Meditations on First Philosophy, intended for the learned men of his time — the title in Latin is "Meditationes de prima philosophia," "Meditations on First Philosophy," he takes up Aristotle's grand designation. So why did we go from first philosophy to metaphysics? Well, you'll laugh, yes, because it's an anecdote. When Aristotle died, his disciples arranged his library and they placed all the works dealing with first philosophy, the search for principles and foundations, after the physics.
26:59 "Metaphysica." That's where the notion of metaphysics comes from. So you see, at the beginning, during the first three books, all his predecessors — I won't dwell on it, because it's extraordinarily rich, and also, it's a stroke of luck for us, as I often tell you, that of the pre-Socratics, the thinkers he alludes to, we have no complete work from them, we have scattered fragments, thanks precisely, fortunately, for example, to what Aristotle says of them, since he still had their works at hand at the time.
27:37 Empedocles, Democritus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and so on, and Anaxagoras, and Pythagoras — to name only the most important. And then, once he has spoken of his predecessors, he enters the scene in the fourth book, with these solemn phrases: "There is a science that studies being qua being." And there begins the history of what, in the history of thought in Europe, will be called ontology — "on" simply meaning being in Greek.
28:12 There is a science that studies being qua being, and not qua mobile being — that's physics, he's the one speaking — not qua being endowed with a soul, living beings; for the Greeks it's not at all a soul in the Christian sense, it's not the soul opposed to the body, no, no, on the contrary, it's the animal — animal meaning there is an anima, a soul, animating it, which is not inert, like a plant; that's part of Aristotle's treatise on the soul, what's called psychology, the study of the psyche, the soul, whose first treatise is the "De Anima"
28:55 in Latin, by Aristotle — psychology for the Greeks is equivalent to what we would call biology, even if it would be a biology not at all mechanistic like ours, but anyway, that in passing. So, a science that studies being qua being, not animate being — that's psychology, the science of the soul — not being in motion — that's physics, which includes astronomy, everything you like, mechanics, dynamics, etc.
29:31 No, but being qua being — you see why I spoke of extension, it starts to click, because what is common to all these domains is that they are within being, and Aristotle adds, even nonbeing, even what is not, we can speak of nothingness; when we say there is being, and there is non-being, we suddenly give an extension to non-being — there's nothing more extensive than that notion. I'll continue: this solemn statement — this science resembles none of those, none of the so-called particular sciences, for each of the particular sciences cuts out a certain part of being, and the attributes that belong to that part — I'm quoting word for word here, from Tricot's translation, published by Vrin, for example, since everyone, most students in France, worked from this edition, quite old now, which has an enormous critical apparatus, sometimes you have a whole page of notes, and then just two lines of Aristotle above, with that much of notes below.
30:42 So all these sciences cut out a part of being, and the attributes that belong to it, as we saw, for example, the beings that have the attribute of being mobile — that's what physics will take hold of. Several statements: there is one, you heard, and only one, science of being qua being; secondly, it resembles none of the particular sciences; thirdly — and I haven't said this yet — it belongs to the philosopher, and to him alone, to him properly speaking, whatever little philosopher he may be, to study being qua being.
31:25 The others will have excuses for not concerning themselves with it, for concerning themselves instead with that part of being they cut out and on which they study the attributes belonging to it, whereas the philosopher would be inexcusable for not addressing the science of being common to all beings. So you see, when I say that each of the other disciplines is part of being, and since the philosopher is the specialist in being qua being, well, all fields of knowledge become parts of philosophy.
All the sciences, parts of philosophy 32:02 And that's why I speak of philosophical imperialism. I hope that's much clearer now. Nowadays, it's unthinkable. At the science faculty at Jussieu, you're not doing philosophy when you study the movements of electron spin, I don't know what. You see? No, that's not philosophy. But for Aristotle, it is philosophy, a branch of philosophy he calls physics.
32:34 There's a preamble, a vestibule in the palace of philosophy, which I looked at earlier with you — that's logic. You start working with the tools, the words you'll use throughout the philosophical disciplines. Then afterward, you enter the main rooms: physics, the sciences of the soul, psychology — originally psyché, the soul, which I told you often resembles a biology among the Greeks, the science of the living, of the animate — the politeia, the science of the city, politics, poetics, which will play the role of an aesthetics, if you like.
33:15 It's the Poetics that says the main function of tragedy is to inspire terror and pity. It's an encyclopedic mind, it's overwhelming, but there's this aspect, you understand, like a metaphor for imperialism. The philosopher takes everything. Philosophy annexes every field of knowledge.
Socrates brings philosophy down from the sky 33:46 Which is not at all the case, as you'll recall from a little sequence: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. You'll say to me, yes, but it's a family lineage. Yes, but still, it diverged somewhat from Socrates. Socrates practically never concerns himself, nowhere in his teaching does he settle whether the earth is spherical or cylindrical in shape, or whether at the origin of the world there is water, fire, the dry, the moist. That's the work of the pre-Socratics, who at the time were mostly called the physicists.
34:24 Long before physics existed as a science. It would take fifteen centuries, until Galileo, for the physics we know today to begin to take its first steps and assert itself, passing through an early culmination with Newton, for example. But at the time, they were called physicists. Why? Because they had all published a work titled On Nature. That's not the philosopher's object.
34:55 It's meteors. They often wrote about meteors. What is the origin of the rainbow? Yes, I'm serious. You'll say, fine, why not? Well, as you say, why not? But you shouldn't call them philosophers. Today we wouldn't call philosophers those who study, I don't know, the rainbow, why a rainbow appears when the devil beats his wife. You know, when it rains and the sun is out, people say the devil is beating his wife. I mention this because in West Africa, they say the panther has given birth to a leopard cub.
35:29 It's a nice image. Not when there's rain and sun at the same time. So, that's not philosophy there. What happened since the moment of the Socratic initiative? And here I remind you of an important quotation already found in Diogenes Laërtius. This writer — you don't have to remember every name, but Diogenes Laërtius — we owe him this precious compilation, where he gathers it all.
36:00 He's a late writer, from the Roman decline, Greek of course. But he produced a sort of early history, perhaps not of philosophy, but of philosophers, let's say. You should know it's a compilation where things are very uneven. And sometimes it develops at some length, as for Plato, for example, quite interestingly. About Socrates, he says this: it is said — he's the one gathering all the opinions he hears attributed to the people he discusses — that Socrates brought philosophy down from the sky to the earth.
36:37 Ah, but wait, because that's the kind of pompous formula you might shrug off, you might want to say... No, no, it's very precise. It means Socrates no longer concerns himself with the rainbow. You have to take "sky" literally. He no longer concerns himself with knowing how our universe was formed, the Big Bang. No, no, that's not his problem. That's where you understand there's a major stake here. Philosophy doesn't begin with the cognitive. You see why I'm dwelling on this?
Analytic philosophy and the Vienna Circle 37:08 Because here we are, 2500 years later, and we're right in the midst of today's ideology. And that's all I'm talking about. Whatever I discuss, I'm only talking about the dominant ideology. One of the most important schools of philosophy today — this isn't a value judgment — one of the most influential in the contemporary philosophical corpus, is so-called analytic philosophy, which is mainly Anglo-Saxon.
37:47 Since it's Anglo-Saxon, and before America began to count for much, that is, up until roughly the interwar period. It was the wars waged by Europe, through which it committed suicide, that brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the fore, at the end of the last war, and that reduced Europe almost definitively to a follower's role. But let's leave that. So, the analytic school, called Anglo-Saxon because it was mainly England, has founders like Bertrand Russell — Russell, no, he's a mathematician, careful, I'm not talking about his mathematical work, I'm talking about him as a philosopher, founder of analytic philosophy and mathematical logic, with his colleague and friend Whitehead — Whitehead and Russell, yes, who is full of humor, by the way, Russell.
38:44 He was English, and there's often a bit of a little war between this so-called Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy and the philosophy that remained, still too burdened with metaphysics for our analysts, our analytics — namely so-called continental philosophy, Europe, I'm not — Kant, Hegel, Descartes, let's say that's continental philosophy, and the stragglers, myself included, or Sartre, or Nietzsche, whoever, that's continental philosophy — and then those who drop everyday language, as mathematicians did 2500 years ago, and who say P implies Q, proposition P implies proposition Q, that's so-called formal logic, you see, you retain only the form of statements — I'm not simplifying, and enormously so, look into it more closely — if I let myself simplify, it's because you're lucky enough to live in an age when you can look things up online.
39:55 or that, on analytic philosophy, and not only on Wikipedia — but I only mention it to say what will concern us here: one of the main moments, and one of the most fruitful, of this contemporary philosophy was constituted by what was called, during the interwar period, the Prague Circle — sorry, excuse me, I slipped into linguistics there, that's linguistics — the Vienna Circle, excuse me, the Vienna School, the Vienna Circle, centered around fairly different people, one of the best known being Carnap, for example, generally all of them with mathematical, logical, scientific training — Husserl was originally a mathematician, for instance, among the philosophers of the Circle.
40:52 So why do I mention this? Because they quite quickly thought through the relation of philosophy to the sciences. No, no, I don't mean that lightly — they quickly wrote volumes, devoted whole lives to it, so to speak. But I mean, they never conceived of philosophy as anything but this: its goal was the same as science's, namely to know. Except that it aimed at knowledge that was more general, more extensive, perhaps more fundamental than that of the particular sciences.
Between subject and object, no dialogue 41:29 All right? Well, we see that Aristotle was already on this slope, for it is a slope relative to Socrates. Socrates woke us up, he brought philosophy down from the sky to the earth. Leave that to the scholars. It's important, it's important to know, for weather forecasting, for agriculture, for navigation. No, no, but it is important. Leave science to the scientists. The science of what? You see why I speak of sciences of the subject? Because here, we're not dealing with that. Here, we're dealing with the science of objects.
42:00 The earth, the rainbow, seawater, the stars, radiation — objects. They're not a someone, they're a something. And there, Socrates goes about the city, where the someones are. He says, but good heavens, what do you mean by that? Every day we act as if we understand each other, and then as soon as I ask a question, people stumble. What's going on? Is it really certain that we're thinking the same thing with the same words?
42:31 You see, the Socratic initiative, as I've often said, but I repeat it here, shares with the poet's one of the functions that Mallarmé — who certainly knew a thing or two about poetry, whatever we might say of his other qualities — assigns to the poet: to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe. And for that, reflection had to come down from the sky, to the earth.
43:07 For when an astronomer, whether in antiquity or today, tries to think, to reflect, to work out the determinations, the laws, whatever you want to call them, of, say, the stars, or even just the sun, which is one of them, he is not addressing someone who answers him and speaks — because it's not a mute something.
43:37 There's no dialogue there between the scientists — oh, thankfully there is dialogue among scientists! What's magnificent about science is this search for consensus, the fact that it progresses through mutual criticism, and that's very good. But between subject and object, there's no dialogue. Whereas Socrates has as his object — I'm playing on the word this time — no longer the thing in front of me, but the aim, as when we say "what is the object of your visit?"
44:07 I mean, his aim, Socrates's aim, is to meet someone, to establish a dialogue, a dialogue that will allow a "dialogos," a dialectic, to emerge. And we can see something through this, through how we arrived at Aristotle's philosophical imperialism, where in the end everyone who seeks to know — the biologist, the physicist, etc. — is a philosopher for Aristotle.
44:37 Not in a foolish sense — he was one of the greatest minds that ever appeared, I'm not trying to caricature him either. But you see, there's an imperceptible slope by which the philosopher begins to concern himself with what he perhaps shouldn't look at so closely. I say this because I have disagreements with people I've been very close to otherwise, who are renewing that tendency somewhat. Since I'll conclude with that, I won't dwell on it now, but you see that in my outline, at a certain point, I do say, at the end, that I'm speaking of a regression, a naturalistic temptation that produces a regression.
45:23 But for now, let's retain this: from Socrates to Aristotle, so practically, you see, within the same era, not the same generation, but roughly the same period, already the Socratic message tends to be lost. That's why I try to rekindle the torch with my modest means. The great turning points in the history of philosophy occur when this aspect of things returns — for example, with Descartes, we're going to find an omnipresent cognitivism again.
Descartes's tree, the independence of mathematics, Marx 46:03 Descartes too will think through the relation between the sciences and philosophy. And he will propose to us — I found my phone again — the famous Descartes tree. All of philosophy, he truly says, like Aristotle, all of philosophy is a tree whose roots are metaphysics — he's the one speaking — whose trunk is physics, and whose branches — this takes the most time, because chronologically you start with the roots, with the seeds and the roots — whose branches are medicine and morality, the final application, medicine to heal bodies and morality for souls.
46:50 That's not bad! Not bad, but there's still this side, you see, still a bit imperialist. Well, I'm moving too quickly past Aristotle to properly grasp what's at stake here. Why? Before I leave him. To keep my imperialism metaphor: what happens when there's an imperial power — France, colonial and imperial? Little by little, there's the risk that it shrinks like a piece of shagreen leather, meaning the colonies, one by one, start demanding independence, often at moments favored by wars that put the colonial power in difficulty.
47:30 For example, you see the importance of the Second World War for African decolonization, the Brazzaville speeches — let's not repeat a story that's apparently well known, though what's well known isn't necessarily known. So an imperialism threatened by declarations of independence — listen, my metaphor seems to work, because the first declaration of independence came very early on, not exactly in Plato's time, but not long after, at the end of the fourth century, around Euclid, or whoever is designated by that name, probably a team, though we mostly have the name Euclid, of Megara — mathematics establishes itself as a discipline that no longer borrows anything from anyone.
48:23 But which might not have existed without the Socratic and Platonic search for definition: what do you mean by that? Because that's how Euclid begins. It begins with first notions, so-called axioms, definitions, from which one can then build theorems and demonstrations, etc. But in any case, there's no longer any need to answer for it.
48:53 That's where we see the shadow of Kant reappear regarding the question "What must I do?" One can be a saint and be a mathematician, one can be the worst of scoundrels and be an immense mathematician. Understand clearly here the decoupling, the divergence between the purely theoretical, cognitive aim — I insist on the words — where I seek only to know, not to do good or evil, but first to understand how things work.
49:28 when Marx publishes Capital, he has just done an enormous work of cognition. He's not trying to make the revolution, he says, "No, no, no, that will serve those who want to make it, right?" You have to see how it works if you want to get rid of capital. So he spent his life trying to understand how it functions — history in general, the sciences of history, which is the history of class struggle, as the Manifesto reminds us, and above all his own contemporary history, for Marx is no Robinson Crusoe.
50:08 He says this because he made a famous allusion to those who spend their time imagining how the first men came together for the hunt, thinking it might be better to live in society rather than alone, as if men were already men when they were alone. Whereas Rousseau had already seen this — he who was the great singer of nature said that in the state of nature, man is only a stupid and limited animal, I quote, who becomes, only within civil society, since he forms a community — whether a tribe, a clan, a horde, or a city, it doesn't matter — an intelligent being and a man.
50:52 So you see, they came about at the same time — social relation, language, intelligent being, man — that is, it happens when there's a break with what's called the state of nature. Now, Marx, you see, ironizes about those who imagine in this way the origins of humanity or its future — also very fashionable, isn't it — in short, the past or future of humanity, whereas he studies its historical present, capital.
51:24 What determines his historical present. You remember Hegel's phrase? Again, again, something positive in the Hegel-Marx relationship, when Hegel says in a private notebook, "You can never be more than your time, but at best, you will be your time." So what does that have to do with Robinson? He says "But these men, these individuals who decide to associate in order to better hunt down the mammoth, that resembles the present so much."
51:54 They think they're thinking about the past, in fact they're determined by the present. That is to say, free enterprise, you know, everyone on his island, you see Robinson, in his bubble, in his enterprise, who owes nothing to anyone, and then who enters into a relationship, contractual or not, with another. There is a projection of the present onto the past. I think I'm imagining the past and I'm actually, without realizing it, thinking about the present.
52:26 That explains a lot of today's delusions. As I'll end with an allusion to the regressions we're experiencing. I'm not saying that as a definitive condemnation of these regressions, but look at political correctness, for example, what a regression, you can no longer broach certain subjects without being told "you don't have the right to speak like that." Especially when it comes to societal matters, if you look closely.
52:59 You know, I don't bring these up very often, except to say the following. So, you can't talk like that, wait, we have people, we've heard this, it's religious, because it means blasphemy. You're accused of blasphemy. When you talk about racialized people, women in general, men in general, as if the Malian woman who exhausts herself looking for water, and Madame Lagarde, former head of the IMF and of Europe, as if Madame Lagarde, or Madame Bettencourt, may the earth rest lightly on her, I'm not in the habit of speaking ill of the dead, or Condoleezza Rice, who is both a woman and Black, who crushed Iraq under bombs, well, under her administration, alongside Bush, as if you shouldn't speak ill of these women, or maybe it's because they're women, you shouldn't, you see, it's religious, identities.
From the city to the empire: optimism and unhappy consciousness 54:09 How did we get here? So indeed, there is an optimism, I come back to Aristotle, not for much longer, of knowledge. In Aristotle, almost everything becomes knowable, you just have to put it in order, there you go, the philosopher is the one who will apply himself, even if he's the only one who addresses being as being, nonetheless because he knows being as being, he can speak more intelligently than others about mobile being, physics, about mobile being that has a soul, biology, etc.
54:47 There is an optimism of knowledge, these are not unhappy consciousnesses, these are periods when consciousness feels carried along, right? And then you know that this beautiful city collapsed historically, here I become a Marxist again, I leave the field of philosophy, of the sciences, I'm in history. And this Greek city, right, gradually became a dependency, a colony, part of an empire.
55:21 The city gave way to the empire, I'm skipping generations. Already, Aristotle himself, I remind you because many don't know this, was the tutor, the private teacher, of whom? Of Alexander. The one who put an end—no, that was his father first, a Philip of Macedon, I think—who struck heavy blows against Athens coming from the north, those barbarian tribes up there, who said, well, there's a pretty girl in Athens, a pretty boy, I say that because that was more important to the Greeks of that time.
55:56 And then, there are beautiful statues, there are beautiful things, it's cold up there, a bit like the Vikings later, the Macedonians, fierce warriors, I would say, while the Greek sophists were debating being, the one, the multiple, figuring out from how many hairs one can call someone bald, from how many pebbles one can speak of a heap, meanwhile the Macedonians, silently, in the north, were sharpening their spears, honing their weapons, those whom Demosthenes, the great Greek orator, tried to warn his fellow citizens about, though they wouldn't listen, right?
56:37 In a series of speeches dating back to the time of Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon, which is why the bulk of his work is called the Philippics. Demosthenes, someone who spoke with his mouth full, as someone amusingly put it, and it's true, because he stuttered, and they used to put little pebbles under the tongue to prevent stuttering. One of the greatest orators of all time, if that can reassure you, right? He became an orator to overcome his stutter.
57:08 We went from the city to the Empire. The optimism of Plato's, Aristotle's generation became the unhappy consciousness, to speak in Hegelian terms. You have essentially moral schools, the Stoics, the Epicureans, arts of living and wisdom. There was no longer the pursuit of knowing whether it's the one or the multiple, or whether being is continuous or discontinuous. You see this alternation between periods where pure theory matters and periods where values, morality, matter.
From Descartes to Pascal 57:42 I'll dwell on this a bit, I'll take other examples that I've pointed out at other times in other contexts but which we find here too. Look at the 17th century, how we go from the optimism of a Descartes, for whom, in this sense, there is no limit to knowledge once it is set on the right track with the right method he proposes, no limit assigned to it except the weakness, the brevity of my life, as he says, but well, others will take over.
58:13 this optimism of knowledge means that Descartes is one of the last figures of the Renaissance. We find in Ronsard, great poet of the Renaissance, a generation before Descartes, even two generations, a poem that begins, I want to read the Iliad of Homer in three days—there's a thirst to cultivate oneself, to return to the sources, to expand this knowledge which was not the primary concern of medieval society, which had very deep, very serious knowledge, but very specialized and very often related to strict theology.
58:51 So, Descartes, as we've seen, philosophy, physics, is the trunk of the tree, medicine, morals, I don't know, this was around the 1630s, take note of the dates, it's important, some people mention 1636, the condemnation of Galileo. Galileo was forced to retract what he'd said, no, fine, the earth doesn't move, well, he didn't want to end up like Giordano Bruno at the stake, he preferred to compromise, 1636, 1637, that's why the dates speak, there's an order between them, the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on Method—you understand why he's very cautious, because all learned Europe is aware of Galileo's trial, and he, who is on that side, the side of Galilean mechanics, of which he will be the first systematic thinker, thus the principle of inertia is discovered, roughly speaking, by the physicist Galileo, and formulated by the philosopher Descartes: a body subject
1:00:02 to no force is either at rest or moving in a straight line at a uniform speed, there is no longer any internal principle of motion—let's not dwell on this, we'll have other opportunities to come back to it, but that's Descartes's era, the 1630s, well, there you go, I told you, so it's the early 17th century, it's Louis XIII, it's the Musketeers, Versailles is still just a small hunting lodge, Louis XIII likes it, and the son says, when the father tells him, we're not comfortable here, oh yes, but I see it, bigger, the next generation, the longest reign in the history of France, no more question of revolts, the struggle, the Fronde, the last great feudal lords' attempt to challenge the king's power as they did with Louis XIII, duels were banned by Richelieu, that's over, the challenge from the great feudal lords is over, there's a single boss, the primus inter pares, the first among equals, the most powerful lord among lords, unhappy consciousness,
1:01:13 and we go from Descartes to Pascal, Pascal who says—write against those who develop the sciences too much, think—in one generation, we've gone from one optimism, a Descartes who says his aim is to form a method by which one can rise as if by degrees to the knowledge of the most composite things, and I'll cite only the fourth rule of the method, just four principles, his whole method, we're very far from Aristotelian scholasticism, right, with volumes upon volumes of logic, the Organon, method, Organon, it's the same thing, they're tools—of a Descartes who says, I contented myself with the following four: the first was never to accept anything as true that I did not know evidently to be such, the so-called rule of evidence, never to accept anything as true which I did not clearly know to be such, that is to say carefully avoiding prejudgment and haste, in everything that comes before, pre-, pre-, pre-, prevention, precipitation, and to include nothing more in my judgments
1:02:23 than what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it. That's the first. The second, the rule of analysis: to divide a difficulty, a problem, an object into as many parts as would be required to best understand it, that's the rule of analysis; then, conversely, the rule of synthesis: to conduct my thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest, the ones analysis has provided—when we really get down to the molecules, for example, it's like a game of Lego—beginning with the simplest, the easiest to know, and rising as if by degrees to the knowledge of the most composite, and here, showing what I call the optimism of knowledge, even supposing an order among things which do not naturally follow one another.
1:03:27 That means even if I don't yet see today, in the era we live in, the transition that allows, for example, measuring the curve with the straight line, it's not obvious. Later we found the number pi—the Egyptians had it—it's not obvious, try taking a ruler and measuring a circumference. It's not simple. Descartes says there is always a passage, even supposing an order among things which do not naturally follow one another.
1:04:01 There are those who say "Science progresses, but we never grasp the mystery of life." There is an order that leads from mathematics to physics, from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, and so on, which leads Claude Bernard, who founded biology, to say: life is death. There we see the optimism, and then comes the next generation, Pascal, who was much more anguished than Descartes, who lived through a different era. This has been admirably worked through in the masterful work of a Marxist sociologist you know, Lucien Goldmann, whom some of you know, one of the rare influences that Clouscard acknowledges, who wrote about Pascal's era, that of Racine, that of the Jansenists, "Deus absconditus," the hidden God.
1:04:51 The hidden god, Louis XIV. Completely unconsciously. This class—let me close this little parenthesis on the 17th century—this class which was the elite, along with the Protestants, the elite of craftsmanship, the elite of the— these are the Jansenists, the great scholars, the grammarians, the logicians—their social advancement is blocked by the culmination of absolute monarchy. Move along, there's nothing more to see, I'm the boss, the State, that's me.
1:05:22 Which introduces a limit, a powerlessness, and therefore, in a way, a despair. The proof is that optimism will return as soon as Louis XIV dies, with the Age of Enlightenment, the importance of the cognitive returns. You see that all this is much more orderly than it seems, the sciences of history.
Physics, chemistry, biology; why fifteen centuries? 1:05:52 I don't want to dwell on it, I think we've understood the metaphor well here. I'll continue with the declarations of independence, to finish up, because I'm in the process of emptying Aristotle's system of its substance. At the beginning, everything was inside it. Mathematics is the first to declare its independence. After that, we have to wait fifteen centuries, it's true. But it's physics that declares its independence starting with Galileo. One can be a physicist, right, without doing philosophy, even if there's a historical weight to the words.
1:06:24 Newton, when he publishes his treatise which was authoritative, which is still authoritative for most objects that don't get too close to the speed of light, that aren't in microphysics or at excessive speeds, Newton gives his work the title "Principia, Principia Philosophiae Naturalis"—of natural philosophy, physis, that's nature in Greek—"Principles of Natural Philosophy." You see, it's worth remembering.
1:06:54 Well, but anyway, you open the book, there's a lot of philosophy, there's attraction, repulsion, blah blah blah, differentiation—that's important, it's the infinitesimal calculus, fluxions, as they said at the time. There you go. So physics's declaration of independence, it took fifteen centuries. A century after Newton, Lavoisier founds chemistry, after which the intervals shorten.
1:07:28 A few generations, two generations after Lavoisier, Claude Bernard founds biology. And that's it, finally, for the declarations of independence of the natural sciences. They haven't stopped progressing since, but we've gone through all the natural sciences. Well, when I say physics, it's a continent within which you can distinguish afterward the regions, the countries you want, right? Surface physics, solid state physics, soil mechanics, I don't know, let's say astrophysics, microphysics, well, there's no shortage of specialization, quite the opposite.
1:08:07 And in mathematics, the same, let's say the mathematical sciences, number theory, topology, well, I don't want to pretend I know about this, I know very little about it, I speak in practice, right, about the mathematical method and mathematical calculation. So we stop at the point where the human sciences are about to enter the scene, you notice. But before addressing them, I go back.
1:08:38 And if I were in class with you, so to speak, if we hadn't been separated by distance, the older ones, and the lockdown, if you were in the Goscinny room where we had the pleasure of meeting regularly not so long ago, and so I hope we'll meet again soon, because still, the conviviality, a little meal afterward, all that was nice all the same. And putting a face to a name, as happened at our General Assembly, there were a few, I thank them, who took part, and I was finally able to put faces to people I knew only through correspondence, that gave me immense pleasure.
1:09:11 So, if we were here live, I would tell you, you'd ask yourselves the question, but we couldn't answer it instantly, you'll see that the answer takes shape after all. How is it that it took 1500 years to go from Greek mathematics, which was highly developed, to its first application to Galileo's physics fifteen centuries later?
1:09:41 Why this immense lapse of time? It's an interesting question. And you've noticed that afterward the intervals shrink, from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology. So, since I said you weren't there to ask questions when we're not live, I'll give you some elements of an answer. I don't have the answer, just elements of an answer.
1:10:11 let's be humble. But, the most interesting ones, philosophically speaking, because we're going to talk about the subject in the answer. We're finally going to see the subject reappear, because with all these sciences, we were dealing with objects. What happens is that when we go from mathematics to physics, we understand that the leap is significant, because it's the first time we're not only dealing with words, but with things. We're engaging with the real.
1:10:42 In other words, it gets closer to us. Because we, we are in reality. We, our body—we'll soon come to deal with biology, medicine, chemistry. So there is, interestingly, philosophically, an enormous resistance, completely unconscious. You see, we said, absolute knowledge is permanently opposed by an absolute non-knowledge which may have no interest in knowing, we saw that especially when we worked on...
"Useless", the vulnerable word in the question 1:17:41 Thank you. I'm happy to be back with you. I'm sorry about this incident. I'm told the incident comes from the network itself. It's not our fault. That's small consolation. I hope it doesn't happen again. I'm told the signal is weak on the network. Maybe there are many of us pulling on it tonight.
1:18:13 I resume my progressive dispossession of the Aristotelian empire, since each of the scientific disciplines he wanted to include within philosophy has broken free. When we reach the 19th century, practically speaking, things are settled. And so philosophy, in the end, is reduced to a shrinking remnant.
1:18:47 And so we arrive at the kind of topic that can be given in a philosophy class, a bound discipline, in scientific tracks, something like: Do you think that nowadays the development of science and technology has made philosophy useless? This kind of question seems all very simple. It's at the heart of our problem. If we ask this question—I don't know if it's asked seriously, because as long as we ask it, that's fine.
1:19:21 The good student is the one who sees to what extent this poses a problem. But the one who immediately says, well yes, what more do we need? Well, we don't need it anymore. Well, now, I don't know, we turn to cognitive science and we immediately see what thought is, memory. I don't know, language too. It's all a matter of stimulus, reflexes, enzymes—I don't want to caricature, but really, it's more of that order, right, than of Socratic dialectic.
1:19:52 Or of dialectic. Or of dialectic, then. Where I'm getting at. I want to get at the fact that we're going to treat this as if we were doing the essay. I don't know. I'd already said, but for those who remember, that the good student is the one who immediately spots the vulnerable word in the question.
1:20:23 The vulnerable word in philosophy is the one that is most philosophically interesting, the one that poses the most problems. And it poses all the more problems the more unnoticed it is, the one that seems to pose the least. Because if I ask each of you to give definitions of philosophy, you might feel intimidated. What is a science? You might feel intimidated. So the heavy words in this essay topic, has the development of science and technology made philosophy useless?
1:20:54 Technique, what is that? Science, philosophy. And then we don't pay attention because we think we know that already. Useless, we know what that means, we hear it every day. Forget it, it's useless. That's the most important word. Why? Because useful means what serves some purpose, you know that well, apparently. In other words, it's a word that has no meaning in itself. You cannot decide, of anything, whether it's useful or useless, if you follow, without having specified for what purpose.
1:21:28 Is it useful to have ice on a soccer field? No, but on an ice hockey rink, yes. Is rain useful—let's replace philosophy with rain, is rain useful? There are plenty of you clever enough to tell me right away, well, it depends, it's a disaster for the beach vendor who has a hut on the beach.
1:21:59 And it's a godsend for the farmer who had been waiting for it for a month of drought. So words like useful, and thus useless, unwittingly express—here we're not in science, not in mathematics, not in physics, not in biology. We're on the path opened up by Socrates, which we sometimes lose and are in the process of rediscovering, at all the great junctures, the great stages of philosophical progress.
1:22:32 What? We're making a value judgment while thinking we're making a judgment of existence. We thought we were talking about what is, and we're talking about what ought to be. A value is what it is, the good, the beautiful. I often use this example, because I was discussing it with an athlete friend. This stadium is well designed—that means nothing in itself, it depends on whether it was designed for ice hockey or for soccer.
1:23:05 These are not the same requirements, not the same specifications, if you prefer to speak in technical terms. In any case, addressed to those who are going to build it, carry it out, the contractors for example, at the end of the chain, and the excavators and the masons. Nothing is useful or useless apart from an end. For a stone, nothing is useful or useless. Whatever brings me closer to the end I am pursuing is useful — and here I take "end" in every sense, from the most elementary, the goal pursued by the feline moving silently toward its prey, without making the slightest noise; that's not the predator.
1:23:48 Every time it gets closer to its prey and the prey hasn't bolted, because it did everything necessary to move forward silently, it is doing useful things — useful for itself, for the goal it is pursuing. And fatal, of course, for the prey. Deadly, not useless — deadly for the prey. So you see, come on, it's simple. Rain is a catastrophe for the beach-goer, and a blessing for the farmer. Good grief, the same thing. These aren't qualities.
1:24:21 It's not like light, which is either polarized or not, white or coloured. It's not that. We're not talking about the properties of things and of being, we're talking about ourselves. A subject has come back. That's why we're in philosophy. Because it is only for someone, as you've guessed, that something can be useful or useless, and not for the stone or the mountain.
1:24:57 And so, pursuing an end, being a subject, making a value judgment — you can sense that all of this, moreover, belongs to the same semantic field. Just look closely. Now, I'm asking you to make an effort of reflection, it's worth the trouble: this notion of an end is at the heart of the articulation between our first part and the second.
Scientism: the country doctor 1:25:27 I think that, given the importance of the outline, and the problems being raised, we won't have — it wouldn't be asking too much — could we, next time, continue developing this outline? And how far along are we, Philippe? I think, because I haven't... There we go, we're at an hour and a half, you see, every time I ask the question, we're somewhere around an hour and a half. So I will say this much: the second part is scientistic imperialism.
1:25:59 I'm not saying scientific. Science is not an ideology. Scientism is an ideology. The discourse of many scientists, when they leave their field of competence, when they stop lining up equations and start giving their opinion on life, death, good, evil — that's their right. But at that point, they must no longer claim their expertise as backing.
1:26:29 You have to be honest. There used to be people who did that, a species that is now, shall we say, endangered: the family doctor, you know. Especially in villages, the country doctor, the family doctor. Illustrated by a very famous film, Doctor Knock, the one who used to ask you whether it itched or tickled, right, who was already doing his marketing, so to speak, by terrifying the population to make them understand they needed the doctor.
1:27:03 Well. But I'm not badmouthing medicine, it's admirable. But there are crooks everywhere. Now, if we just take this example — I stopped at biology on purpose, because after that we went through the so-called natural sciences. But precisely, scientism — let me go back to my country family doctor — is someone who, thank goodness he was there, well you know, having a bowel obstruction on a remote farm in Auvergne, or where I'm from in Corsica, or even not far from Paris, there are places, you know, where the doctor wasn't seen very often.
1:27:51 And when it was over, when he had reassured people, given them a remedy or a prescription, that it wasn't serious, the conversation would start. "So, who are you going to vote for on Sunday?" Hey, the doctor! There, there's a scam. Because he's using his cognitive prestige, which is undeniable, in a field that is his own, as if it granted him competence no longer to answer the question "What can I know?" — "What's wrong with my husband?"
1:28:21 But "What must I do?" No, not "What can I do?" — well, the doctor will tell you "take the antibiotics." No, no, "What must I do?" You see? I'm going to get to the exactly symmetrical, inverse imperialism. When people say "philosophy has become useless, the sciences are here now," travel — it's not that I fear unemployment, I'm making it retirement.
Knowledge and wisdom; Kant and the crisis 1:28:54 No, no, that's not it. It's that — let me recall the essential lesson taught to us by the word "useless" when we explored it — these are words that, like all value judgments, only make sense in relation to a goal, an end. To say that philosophy is useless because of the development of science and technology implies — and here I'm no longer in value judgments, I'm in pure logic, I'm getting close to the mathematicians again — it implies acting as though philosophy and science had the same goal, namely science, scio, scire meaning "to know" in Latin, to know, as if knowledge were the sole aim of the philosopher and not also wisdom, that is, answering the question "What must I do?"
1:29:48 Do I get married or stay single? Do I marry a coquette with whom I'm madly in love? I say "coquette," it's an archaic term, don't take it too seriously. But these were problems people asked themselves in the old days, weren't they? Or do I marry Martin's sister, who owns forty cows and has access to the river with a slight drop in elevation — one could get energy from that.
1:30:19 That's no longer a problem of knowing, it's a problem of value. What is worth more? This already presupposes that we're pursuing a goal in life — I told you once, but there's nothing we forget so quickly. Ask someone close to you, someone back in school, your classmates: "Why do you want to pass the bac?" "Oh right, funny, me, I'm taking the bac to get a job, the way things are these days it's not really enough, the bac, it's necessary but not sufficient."
1:30:58 "And why do you want a job?" "Well, to have money." Sorry, I'm talking like the street, like certain streets. "And why do you want money?" Because it gets muddled. After four or five questions, it's "so that we can live." And we've just learned that it's not because we didn't have time to ask the question.
1:31:29 We could have started right there, you see. The question of the end. Of value. Socrates brought reflection down. It's said that he brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. He didn't say it was useless to think about the sky. But that it wasn't his job as a philosopher — there were meteorologists there for that. Astrophysicists who could think about the sky in another way.
1:32:01 Poets, why not? Is there anything more beautiful than the starry vault? Think of an incomparable August night in the desert or high in the mountains. The stars swarming. It was Kant who said that nothing serious could happen to him as long as there is the starry heavens above his head and the moral law within his heart. Now that's a philosopher. He has both. One outside him, right? And the search for the categorical imperative of the moral law.
1:32:32 So, let me recall that the history of philosophy is punctuated by back-and-forths between a cognitivist tendency in which philosophy somewhat forgets its essence. I'm not saying it forgets what's most important. How could I decide that essence is not what's most important — it's not mine to decide. But for the philosopher, yes: that is, he has no specificity unless there is precisely something other than knowing the diameter of the sun.
1:33:11 Right? Or the atomic reactions occurring in its core. Right? Whether it's fusion or fission or both. I'll stop there before I say something foolish. These are very important problems on which perhaps our destiny depends, given the applications this can have. Look, since we are trying to reproduce exactly what happens inside the sun, between Orange, Pierrelatte, Avignon, with the ITER project.
1:33:42 Which, if successful, should solve all our energy problems, since here the material is clean and free of radioactivity, since the material used will be neither coal, nor gas, nor oil, nor uranium, but hydrogen. First, it's not radioactive, and second, well, it's something we're not at risk of running short of, since 98% of the universe is made of hydrogen. You see? So, it's not all bad news all the time.
1:34:12 You shouldn't only listen to the doom-mongers. I'm poking a bit of fun here. They do worry us a lot; I'm poking a little fun. It's fine. What we've just seen is important. Philosophy too, depending on the era, has moments when it returns to what makes up its specificity. Maybe its specificity doesn't matter, but still. One can keep telling oneself: I ask no questions, I'm not doing a table anymore, why not?
1:34:43 I did that for a long time. But at that point, you shouldn't complain when you get a blow to the head. That's where you find all the origins of our conversations again. Philosophy is the daughter of crisis. As long as we're not in crisis, we can ignore these questions. As long as things work, why bother with questions? All right? Keep quiet and eat, it's fine, there's food, it's fine. Why would we have any...
1:35:15 Keep quiet and walk. Go for a swim. No, but... And when there's a crisis, suddenly there are questions. Well, yes. And sometimes it's a bit late. And I'll end there for today, just as I was about to move from philosophical imperialism to scientistic imperialism, which is making a spectacular comeback today, whereas we thought we had moved past it in peaceful coexistence — I'll come back to that as a third part. Starting from Kant, to go quickly, starting from Kant, we're going to divide up the tasks.
1:35:47 The sciences have an infinite domain, I can't limit it, but which deals with the relation of cause and effect. And in the domain of nature, the sciences of history — he doesn't put it that way, Kant, he doesn't yet say the human sciences, but practical philosophy, as he calls it, you see what kind of action — deals with answering the question "What must I do?" but rigorously, not at the corner café. So there. And I'll end on this magnificent phrase of Aristotle, to whom I'll do justice after all, when he says: mathematics unites men, politics divides them.
Theses on Feuerbach, Bachelard and the Pythagorean theorem 1:36:23 You see, we already find our two domains again. Well, we'll see the rest next time. For now I'll stop at the edge of peaceful coexistence. Yes? Yes, go ahead. Ah, of course. First, I greet Bastien, who is faithful and always asks very pertinent questions. Except that here, I wonder if there isn't a bit of confusion with the Theses on Feuerbach. Because if there's one thing Marx rehabilitates, even against his own early works, against his Feuerbachian period, since the Theses on Feuerbach are often theses against Feuerbach — we look at what there is...
1:37:07 there is the truth of Feuerbach, the critique of religion. But on the other hand, religious alienation — and this is indeed what Marx reproaches Feuerbach for in the Theses on Feuerbach — the fact that everything proper to us, human genius, everything positive, we placed it in God, and we kept the negative for ourselves; so we must — I'm speaking on Feuerbach's behalf — we must reclaim everything we placed in God, freedom in particular.
1:37:38 Magnificent! And so, to the benefit of what? And this is Feuerbach's weakness: nature. Let's leave the supernatural where we placed our treasures and return to nature. In other words, Marx says, he skips over millennia of history. And here I join what Bastien is saying: history is the history of praxis. However, one must be careful not to turn the criterion of practice into a kind of new religion.
1:38:16 One must not say that a piece of knowledge is not knowledge when it lies outside of practice. There is a magnificent study by Bachelard in a book called Le rationalisme appliqué, published by Presses Universitaires de France, a reflection on the epistemology of mathematics in which he ponders the Pythagorean theorem. I won't bore you with it, but the demonstration is quite crude, so not very complicated.
1:38:48 The demonstration was purely geometric, almost visual, a long time ago. You construct a square whose side length is the hypotenuse. You do the same with each of the other sides. So you have three squares, a large square on the hypotenuse and two unequal squares, each using the length of one of the two other sides of the triangle as its unit. And then the little triangles inside, with the diagonals and so on, you rearrange them quickly and you see that you've proved the Pythagorean theorem.
1:39:22 And Bachelard quotes a certain Bouligand, a logician-mathematician, who said: "But good grief, there was no need to go outside the triangle and build all those squares. Just drop the altitude." You see? Drop the altitude from A, A, H, E. You divide your triangle into two similar triangles. First of all, and you can, within the triangle, demonstrate what Bachelard calls "intrinsic Pythagoreanness," without leaving it, without leaving the right triangle.
Why the Greeks did not have physics 1:39:57 Why am I talking about this? To answer Bastien, because Bachelard concludes: learn to do as the gods do, to work without doing anything. Yes, there is a theoretical aim — mathematics, that's what it was among the Greeks. And that's why they never developed physics. Not because they were ignorant. If Bastien says that a piece of knowledge is not knowledge unless there's a practical aim, that is contradicted by the extraordinary...
1:40:27 theoretical flourishing, in philosophy, in linguistics, in mathematics, in Greek geometry. But there is no physics. Physics quickly followed with the scientific revolution — that's how we refer to the passage of the 16th, 17th centuries — with the industrial revolution. Because it took the power of physical theories before we could leave millennia-old technique behind and arrive at technology.
1:41:02 That is, to return to technique after this great detour through mathematics. "But why would you need machines?" Aristotle said — and this speaks directly to our friend Bastien's question, our comrade — if shuttles wove by themselves, we would have no need of slaves. So I appeal here, quite evidently, to our friend Bastien's relevant knowledge of Marxism to tell him that what blocked the development of physics in Greece is not the fact that Aristotle's brain, or that of the Greek mathematicians, the Greek scientists, was limited.
1:41:46 It's among the greatest we've ever seen. No, it's a socio-economic-political-historical reason. It's a relation between men that blocks the relation to the thing. A fine example of a fundamental Marxist law: relations of production become an obstacle to the development of productive forces when they persist too long, when they fail to adapt to the new developments.
1:42:20 brought about by the development of productive forces. There. Is there a second question? No, oh, I thought it was a question. Thanks anyway very much for Bastien's question. But once again, we must not end up with Anglo-Saxon pragmatism. The truth of the pudding is in the eating. Our relationship to practice must not become that.
1:42:51 To which I would answer, as Althusser does — you see, I criticize him often, but here he's right. And he alludes to some Marxists who often fell into this trap, people who believed themselves Marxist but took theory a bit lightly. Now, what Marx rehabilitates in the Theses on Feuerbach is theoretical activity; he pays tribute to German idealism for having developed Tätigkeit, the theoretical activity of the mind. And this is a line that runs from Marx to Lenin, who would say: without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice.
1:43:29 So one shouldn't just say "act, act." Action, yes — action is not agitation. Remember well Bouligand the mathematician's phrase: when he drops the altitude, he acts like the gods, learns to work without doing anything, after all. That's why we need machines to develop the productive forces. There we go. Until next time, I hope, and thank you very much, Bastien. Faithfulness warms the heart. Because we really need it.
1:44:00 Thank you, Philippe. And so, the same outline, as we've done in a very univocal way — very soon on our Facebook page, and thank you.
