English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Plato, dramatist of dialogue 0:00 How can one speak after such a performance? Meletus's reply is excellent too.
0:33 And I would remind you all the same that it's a joy to see, if I may say so, Socrates and Plato. You know that we have nothing in writing from Socrates. I repeat, it's Plato who makes him speak. Plato who was his disciple for years. He knew him well. Just as Aristotle was at Plato's school for 30 years afterward. When Aristotle speaks of Plato, one may agree or disagree, but still, he knew him better than we do.
1:04 But the fact that... For now I'm speaking indifferently of Socrates or Plato. Socrates through Plato. Plato is surely the greatest artist in the history of thought. So I come back here to this artistic representation as well. We are dealing here with a Vorstellung, as they say in German philosophy, a representation. When things are not present, one must devise some subterfuge to represent them.
1:38 And when a country isn't present, it has its representative, the ambassador for example, doesn't it? A plenipotentiary to represent it. Because it isn't present. And Plato is one of the greatest... I say all this to stay close to the theatrical success we've just witnessed. Plato is surely one of the greatest dramatists in history. The simple fact that this absolutely unique work in the history of written philosophy comes down to us in a dramatically dialogical form, dialogos, of discourses, that clash with one another.
2:19 And Plato even goes so far as to say that truth is like the spark that isn't present in either of the two stones taken separately, but which results from their striking and rubbing together. So you see, I say all this to show how much the dramatic performance of a Platonic dialogue is not only not a betrayal, but is the restitution of what is perhaps most Platonic in Plato. And to continue, because I will still need to get to tonight's theme that I've been invited to address — it's not for me to choose, I'll try to discuss it — namely how Socrates's initiative is at the origin of a revolution, the effects of which are not yet exhausted at the moment I'm speaking to you, far from it, and I'll get to that right after.
Diogenes Laërtius brings Plato into the history of theater 3:09 But I'll stay a bit longer in this introduction to make the transition with the performance and the reading we've just enjoyed. Diogenes Laërtius — some of you probably know him — is the author of this incredible compilation, as we'd say today, that has come down to us as 'Doctrines and Sayings of Illustrious Philosophers,' a kind of history — we'd say today 'history of philosophy' — of thinkers above all.
3:41 We'll come back to this distinction. There's nothing better, to understand how Socrates constitutes a revolution, than to distinguish thought in general from philosophy in particular. But yes, Diogenes Laërtius, in this work, reviews more or less the thoughts, the most famous phrases, the quotations of all the famous writers of his time, the thinkers of his time — thinkers because there were physicists as well as astronomers, mathematicians, Pythagoras.
4:14 And then, when he gets to Plato, it's one of the longest passages in this incredible compilation, if I may say so. Something incredible happens. He doesn't make Plato emerge in the history of philosophy at all, and for good reason, because there isn't... Plato is the first system of written philosophy that has come down to us. I'll come back to this — for now I'll just state it. There are very profound thoughts before the Greeks, but here we're talking about philosophy, not thought in general.
4:46 You see, I insist. So there is a history of thinkers, essentially the pre-Socratics, as they're called, before Socrates — Thales, Pythagoras, you know the names. They're easy to remember because... Well, I'll give you an easy way to remember them in order. Each has a quotation that sums up his whole thought. For example, everything is number — that's Pythagoras.
5:16 Tell me, that has had quite a future, right up to today, in the age of the digital. Everything flows — that's Heraclitus, each has a quotation, I won't read them all. Each has a principle. The atom, for Democritus: nothing exists but the atom and the void, and everything else is commentary. Paper, gold, cardboard, love, God — it's a combination of atoms. Can you imagine, at that time, even Democritus, five centuries before Christ, he deserves to be brought out.
5:48 Nothing exists but the atom and the void, and everything else is commentary and, if you will, a combination of these atoms. So you see, it's convenient to know them this way. One principle, the atom; one quotation, nothing exists but the atom and the void, etc. And so he tells this history and arrives at Plato. It stops being a history of thought to become a part of the history of literature. I come back to theatre. What does he say? He goes back to the cult of Dionysus, because at the origin of all theatre there is the dithyramb, homage to Dionysus, a religious festival at the outset.
6:26 Dramatic art — I don't mean tragedy, it can be comic — dramatic art, theatre. Drama in Greek means action. When there is movement, when we laugh or cry, when there is movement, it is not the lyrical, where one is entirely absorbed in a feeling of melancholy or, on the contrary, of triumph. There is movement. The difference, for those interested in the classical repertoire, between Schubert, who is constantly in a feeling of despair like no one else, or on the contrary of ecstasy, barely bearable, and Beethoven, who never shut himself into a single feeling, but wants to go all the way to resolve the problem.
7:06 You see, for example, it's magnificent in both cases, to distinguish the lyrical from the dramatic. So there, Diogenes Laërtius makes Plato emerge within a history of literature where he says: there was the dithyramb of Dionysus, that is, there was an officiant, a priest, who came before the crowd gathered as the city. I'm making a parenthesis, I know I'm a bit exasperating, but it's to stay at the heart of my subject. Don't think I'm wandering off — quite the contrary. It is likely, you see, I'm no longer speaking with certainty, but it is likely that at the origin of theatre there is sacrifice.
7:45 Including, long ago, human sacrifice, and that the very first actors were the one who sacrificed, his victim, and facing them, petrified, the city, the tribe, the people. There, I'll move on. Fortunately, the killing became represented, and no longer present. So there was the Dionysiac sacrifice, and then, says Diogenes Laërtius, Plato came along and invented dialogue, added a voice, and that's how he brings Plato into the history of literary genres.
Why speak of Socrates and revolution 8:22 You see, this is to pay one last tribute to the marvelous performance we've just seen. So now I move on to Socrates and revolution. It may seem paradoxical. Why suddenly talk about politics? Why are we going to talk about politics now? We don't know that it bothers anyone, but why are we talking about this apropos Socrates, when we just heard Socrates himself say — I'll put it more clumsily than the actors did — 'Athenians, I have never involved myself in political affairs,' you heard it as well as I did, 'in public affairs, in the affairs of the city.'
8:54 When I speak, I try to persuade in private. There's an example earlier, from a dialogue of Plato's. Why? And why not only talk politics, but talk about revolutionary politics? Well, because this aspect of Socrates as a beginning — as Bertrand already suggested to us, kindly agreeing to introduce my little talk — the fact that Socrates is a beginning, a commencement, whose effects we still feel, this kind of absolute beginning is called a revolution.
9:38 It is not a revolt. I'll read you later an excerpt from Maurice Merleau-Ponty — some of you know him, a contemporary of Sartre and Camus, a bit less in the media and less famous than Sartre and Camus, but an immense author, who wrote — I recommend it to you, forgive me, but on the train I spilled a bottle of white wine vinegar on this book, I'm sorry, well anyway, I don't know how to mind my own business either, I'm not comparing myself to Socrates, but there — In Praise of Philosophy, it's really a marvel, it's a wonderful work.
10:12 So, before reading you excerpts from it — I don't like reading text during a lecture, but here you'll see why it's a bit exceptional, to live up to the program I was assigned, Socrates and the Revolution. But as a preamble, very quickly, in what sense is this a beginning? It's the beginning of philosophy, Socrates. That's enough — nonsense, well, there is Hindu-Chinese thought, well before Socrates, Socrates being roughly the 5th century BC — dizzying, absolutely agreed.
10:49 I would even say that I prefer a profound thinker to a mediocre philosopher — I'm not making a value judgment there, but I'm saying that Socrates is the first to inaugurate a way of posing problems and questioning that is properly philosophical, and which is not thought in general. Do you know what they were called? The predecessors of Socrates, precisely, who came before him. I never said there was no profound thought before him. They're called the pre-Socratics, to indicate that they come before Socrates.
From pre-Socratic physicists to good and evil 11:20 As for meaning, that doesn't tell us much, it's purely chronological. But do you know what they were called in Greece? Perhaps some of you know. The...? The physicists. Bravo! Well, physicists, for you it's the same. Thank you. Exactly. Because they had all written a work called Peri phuseôs, in Greek, meaning 'on nature.' Phusis is nature. Physics is the science of nature. Well now, we're reviewing some interesting things. Yet today you wouldn't classify physics under philosophy.
11:50 And philosophy is not at the CNRS, as far as I know. Nor at CERN in Geneva, where there is currently the largest active particle accelerator in the world. So they were called the physicists. You see, I'll stay close to the play we've just seen. We wouldn't say that today. But at one point, remember, at the beginning, Socrates says he was accused of dealing with strange things, celestial things, happening above our heads.
12:32 And he says, I have so many accusers lurking in the shadows that I cannot name any of them, except one — remember. He says a certain one, he doesn't name him, but we recognize him, a certain comic playwright. You don't need to be a great insider to understand he's talking about Aristophanes, who indeed, historically, I know, was among Socrates's accusers. Besides, one of the greatest writers of comedy that ever existed. Now, the text, the work, the most famous, most emblematic — as a journalist would say — of Aristophanes's works is called The Clouds.
13:06 You see, we're not straying — The Clouds, that which is above our heads, in the clouds, the physicists. Is water or fire at the origin? Is there earth? Was it cube-shaped, square, round? It's incredible that Socrates could be accused of that, when Diogenes Laërtius, the one who made the compilation I told you about, said it very well — it was the opinion of all Socrates's contemporaries — that he brought philosophy down from the heavens to the earth. There are dialogues of Socrates that begin with, tell me, what is the best way to educate my child?
13:42 We're no longer among the galaxies there! We are dealing with what concerns you, me, each one of us. And just as, like every good Greek, one would go, in case of difficulty, to consult the oracle — the oracle she alluded to, the one who said Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, since he alone knew that he knew nothing, while the others didn't even know that. The oracle is at Delphi, and the Greeks said Delphi was the navel of the world.
14:13 I say this because there's a great German poet, whom everyone knows I love very much, Hölderlin — well, I love him very much, that's beside the point — but who is one of the greatest poets who ever existed, who said that Frankfurt was the navel of the world. And now indeed there's the central bank there. Let's leave that aside. He brought philosophy down from the heavens to the earth — broadly speaking, well, I don't want to make you lose too much time — that means we moved from a purely cognitive problem, what is the origin, fire, water, the Big Bang as we'd say now, to moral problems, which are not cognitive.
14:53 The true and the false — that is not the monopoly of philosophy, it interests the mathematician too, the true and the false, the physicist, the biologist, science — science, that word comes from scire, which simply means 'to know.' To know, to be acquainted with — if you say that 2 plus 3 equals 7, it's because you don't know the sum of 2 and 3. So knowledge is not merely an opinion like at the corner café. No, no, knowledge can only be true if it is really knowledge, a genuine cognition. So philosophy has no privilege there, discussing the true and the false — but the good and the evil, that is no longer worked on at the CNRS.
15:32 That's it, the deep meaning of Socrates having brought philosophy down from the heavens to the earth. And why did I mention the oracle? Because when one went to consult the oracle, you know, all those — moreover, if some of you have had the joy of visiting the site, the incredible site of Delphi — at the entrance of the temple, there was written: yes, know thyself, Gnôthi seauton. Well, that too is not what the physicist and the mathematician are after, those who want to know.
16:03 And careful, I'm not — this isn't reductive. I wouldn't be here if science hadn't existed. I mean, I might not even be alive still. No, I have nothing against it. I'm distinguishing domains that have nothing to do with each other and that we fail to distinguish. Sometimes people think philosophy is the same domain as science, just pushed a little further, a little deeper. No, they have nothing to do with each other, the true and the false versus the good and the evil. To find out the true and the false, it's interesting to question a mathematician.
16:33 But for the good and the evil, it may be more useful to question an illiterate — I mean someone who can neither read nor write, but who is a sage deep in an African village, in the middle of the forest. It's a matter of knowing the good and the evil. If, for example, I must put my grandmother to death — unfortunately, grandmothers have long since passed away, they're perishable — or instead leave her alive, isn't that so? You know, that's a real debate, euthanasia.
17:04 But that is not a matter of knowledge. I hope we'll still be discussing it in 2000 years without having the answer. Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens to the earth. It sounds grandiose, but no, that's exactly what it means. He brought us back to ourselves — know thyself. One can live without knowing how many satellites orbit Jupiter. I didn't say one should. All that is very useful. But one can. Yet none — I was talking about an African village, sorry, but I spent nearly 40 years there, south of the Sahara.
17:37 The village couldn't survive 48 hours if it were permitted to throw a dead cow's carcass into the village well. You see? So the question 'what can I know' creates a companionship between the philosopher, the scientist, the mathematician — we'll come back to that. But the question 'what must I do,' that is the one Socrates strove to answer. You saw his admirable conclusion, didn't you? He was offered a chance to escape at the time. The play shows it well. His friends, Plato and the rest, sort of the establishment, had pooled money together to say, 'Wait, we'll pay your bail, we'll free you.'
Thought in general and philosophy: "what do you call?" 18:13 He tells them no, I have spent my whole life upholding the law of the city, it's not today that I'm going to betray it. You see? The question 'what must I do,' he asked it right to the end. So, I haven't yet clarified what now constitutes the distinction, and I'll end my introduction on this, though it's a bit long but important, between thought in general and philosophy in particular. I told you, there are dizzyingly profound thoughts well before the Greek moment in history and Socrates, etc.
18:43 the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, the great books of Hindu thought, the Tao Te Ching among the Chinese, the Tibetan Book of the Dead — admirable, it was read into the ear of the dying to guide the first seconds of that journey into the beyond — and the same among the Egyptians, by the way, all of that is dizzyingly profound. And the Buddha's teaching is almost contemporary — well, contemporary with the pre-Socratics, slightly earlier than Socrates, isn't it?
19:20 What's the difference, then? First, I just cited proper names — I don't know, names of God, you see, I don't know myself, Allah, Jehovah, Brahma, whereas the pre-Socratics, already — transitioning toward Socrates — don't use proper names, but speak of being, of the one, of becoming. You see, this is already almost an evolution toward what we'd call today secularism, if you will, as opposed to proper names of God, which was itself audacious — but above all, we're not yet in philosophy.
19:55 We are in philosophy from the moment when, to the question 'what is' — what is the universe, what is the sun, what is the moon, that existed before Socrates — we replace the question 'what is,' which is fairly precise, with the question 'what do you call?' When the question no longer bears on things, but on the words by which we communicate about things. What is a planet? That's an astronomer's question. What do you call a planet? That's a philosopher's question.
20:26 One might say, you're attaching importance to something so marginally important. Well, still, relative to the problem we're raising, it seems a bit marginal. Let me be more concrete. Imagine an astro— it didn't exist yet — an astronomer, a Chaldean astrologer, you know, in Mesopotamia, well before the Greek world, climbing up a ziggurat, you know, those pyramids the Mesopotamians built to see the stars better.
20:58 Which proves that astronomy wasn't very advanced. They thought that at 30 meters up, they would better understand, wouldn't they, the atomic explosions happening inside the star Sirius. Well, and imagine one of these astrologers pondering the question, what is the Moon, what is the Sun? And at the foot of the ziggurat, a little fellow, or a big one, like the admirable actor who, like Gérard I believe, made Socrates so vividly present tonight — someone who, staying at the foot, doesn't address the Sun.
21:39 Can you imagine the Sun answering, the Sun saying, 'Ah, me, I'm not a planet, I'm a star'? No, never. You see why I talk about words? There can be no dialogue with that question, 'what is it?' Whereas the little fellow at the foot of the ziggurat says, 'What do you call...?' And there, the astrologer can answer him and a dialogue begins. The stakes are enormous. Democracy begins. Ah, I'm sliding into politics.
22:09 I'm not very politically engaged, no one is going to be against democracy, but still. Let me be more precise now. When there was that dialogue between Socrates and Meletus, you noticed that Socrates manages to convince him that he's tangling himself in contradictions. Meletus, you can't say one thing and then say the opposite five minutes later. You can't, like Nietzsche, say on page 11 the opposite of what you said on page 10.
22:39 I have a lot of affection for that great ego, Nietzsche. But to turn him into the great iconoclastic guru that some, with odd intentions, have wanted to make of him since the counter-revolution took hold — that is, roughly since the mid-1960s. I've explained myself on this elsewhere, I refer you to my many videos in which I lose myself... that's why... But let's be very precise.
23:10 Socrates' moral questioning, in what way it is foundational, and in what way questioning the words used, addressing someone who speaks, so addressing someone who speaks, addresses someone who can answer him. The engagement of a dialogue, I was speaking of democracy, makes me think of another very famous formula of Plato, of him through whom the thought of Socrates has come down to us. Tradition says, and it has been verified, that Plato had inscribed at the entrance of his school, called the Academy, because he had bought the garden of Academos, in Athens, and he had inscribed at the entrance that none may enter here who is not a geometer.
"Let no one enter here who is not a geometer": Euclid's postulates 24:00 Which means, look how logic immediately follows on, we're not going to do geometry there, that had to be done before entering, right? But, before entering, if you haven't done geometry, it's better to wait, because it's an excellent training for thinking about things we don't see. Try to see a point with your eyes—well, there's something new. I see three apples, I see three books, I cannot see three. I can think it, that's easy, thinking three, but I cannot see it.
24:30 This is what Plato calls the intelligible world as opposed to the sensible world that the senses show us. But well, that business about the senses is scholastic Platonism, we can always come back to it another time. And it's not very complicated. On the other hand, the fact that he inscribed that none may enter who is not a geometer gave that importance to the mathematical disciplines that had just appeared as disciplines. There had been admirable calculations made by the Babylonians, by the Babylonians especially in arithmetic, the Egyptians in geometry.
25:01 In the proper sense, geometry is not the study of the Earth. Geo means Earth. It's the measurement of the Earth. You see, when the Nile had stopped flooding, had gone back into its bed, the land had to be redistributed to its owners. It was better to know the formula for the area of a square. It was quicker than working it out at 50 degrees in the shade. Once you had measured one side, you could already calculate the perimeter by multiplying it by 4, that was quite handy. So there, that's surveying. That's not pure mathematics where you make definitions.
25:34 It's a mathematics already applied to something practical and indeed vital, namely agriculture. It's only with the Greeks, especially around the name of Euclid—whether he was one individual or a team, it doesn't matter, in any case it's an immortal body of work tied to his name—that the first corpus of theoretical mathematics appeared. Right? And in Plato's time, it's Thales and Pythagoras who launch this movement. Where am I getting at? Why am I talking about mathematics when I'm talking about democracy?
26:05 But what's the connection? We're right in the middle of it. For the first time, with Euclid's system for example, there appears a discourse where one says: look, I don't know whether what I'm about to say is true or false, but I ask you at least this—I'm going to demonstrate everything to you, I'm not going to talk to you for nothing. These are demonstrations in mathematics as we know them. A theorem is not a theorem if it isn't demonstrated. On the other hand, at the start, you need a few propositions that are not demonstrated. You all know this, they're called postulates, axioms, definitions.
26:37 We start first with that: these are undemonstrated propositions, but with which, afterward, everything else is demonstrated. The whole point of the game being that there aren't too many of them at the start—otherwise it's too easy, right? But that there be a very small number of first propositions and then an infinity of derived propositions. I say this for those interested, to be a bit more concrete: the whole theory of natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on to infinity, was formally worked out by the Italian Peano in the 20th century, from only 5 axioms.
27:11 0 is a number, every number has a successor, the successor of a number is a number, 0 is not the successor of any number—I always forget the fifth one, it's like the wonders of the world, forgive me, but trust me, there are 5. We still haven't seen the connection with democracy—I'm getting there. What does Euclid call these first notions—axioms, postulates, definitions? Demands. You'll say to me, well, so what, let's move on.
27:42 But wait, you don't realize—demands! I ask you to grant me that through a point one can draw... otherwise I can't continue. Birth of democracy. We need to agree together on statements. It's not about convincing you of my opinion like at the corner café. You know, where there are 60 million football pundits, right? No! It's not about convincing you that I'm right. Nor do you need to convince me that your opinion is the right one.
28:12 But the two of us must, first of all, agree with ourselves. And here I'm alluding, in the play, to contradiction. One must not contradict oneself. We don't yet have any content of truth, but we have the form of truth. The one who doesn't pull the wool over our eyes is the one in whom we cannot detect a contradiction. So you see, this makes us revise important things. And so, so as not to abuse your time, I'll try now to sum up.
28:44 There, that's a revolution. This revolution is rationality appearing. Rationality which is not the discourse of him, of her, of me, of us, of you, which is not the discourse of men against women, women against men, Hutus against Tutsis, Corsicans against the French. What an era, where we're each locked into identities! Can you imagine, at the MEDEF [employers' federation], they must be twiddling their thumbs while we squabble over identities. What bliss. We can do our business and wage war.
29:16 I ask you. That's always how the great economic crises have been resolved, as far as I know. Maybe you know of other exceptions, but the only two world wars we've known so far all emanated from the West. I might be wrong, but do check in the history books. What I'm saying is serious, isn't it? As long as we dialogue, we don't wage war on each other. And so I'm going to focus especially on a dialogue of Plato's that sums up a bit everything I'd like to concentrate on, so that it's not too abstract, so that we have a concrete case—a very particular subject, namely, oratory.
The Gorgias: two ways of persuading 29:53 You remember that Socrates is accused of being an orator, which scandalizes him. He says, no, I don't have the talent, myself, of those who make fine speeches, gimmicks, to seduce young men. No. And precisely, there is a dialogue whose subject is: what is rhetoric, the art of oratory, call it what you like. A dialogue that pits Socrates against one of the most famous sophists of the time, Gorgias, who earned a fortune. There have been very fine allusions to the fact that these people charged a fortune for their teaching.
30:26 Isn't that so? Whereas Socrates never asked for a penny for his maieutics, isn't that so, for his art of midwifing minds, as he called it. I recall that maieutics comes from a word, maia, which means midwife, and just as the midwife does not create the child but helps it come into the world, Socrates said that he does not create knowledge. He would be incapable of that, but that he helps the person he's talking with give birth to the knowledge that is already within them.
30:58 So this dialogue takes place facing Gorgias, each with his young men, his disciples. That matters, because you know that with the rather widespread homosexuality in the Athenian establishment at that time, they're all there with their young men, and so being wrong or being refuted was rather awkward socially. And Socrates asks Gorgias, what should we call you? I am an orator, Socrates.
31:29 So, what does your art consist of? What is the art of oratory? He says, it's the art that relates to discourse. Socrates doesn't waste much time—I'll save you time because there are pages of this. What discipline doesn't apply to discourse? Geology, right? Biology. Every time, there's logos, logos, -logy, which means discourse on—discourse on the earth, discourse on life, biology, right? Discourse on my origins, genealogy—there's always a -logy.
32:00 Ah yes, that's true, it's not precise enough. So, it's a discourse that relates to discourse but with the aim of convincing and persuading. We've made progress, we have a determination. You see how Socrates proceeds? He retains nothing other than what the other person says. And we'll see if he holds to it, if he keeps fulfilling his side of the bargain. So, in that case, we could call it Geometry. What's the connection? says Gorgias. I'm not a mathematician, I'm an orator.
32:30 Wait, he says, but mathematicians too make discourses in order to convince—that's called a demonstration. Yes or no? And here things start to go sour. Because at the start, I didn't tell you—I should have started with this. The first answer, Gorgias—what is your art? He doesn't say what it is, he says it's the finest of all things that exist. There, I went a bit fast, but Socrates tells him, you still haven't told me what it is, but you've told me that it's the finest of things. And now we discover that it's something rather sordid.
33:01 Because there are two ways of persuading. One—let's take shady lawyers, there are excellent lawyers, and crooked lawyers, as they say, right? The one who doesn't care about truth, whose only goal is to get his client acquitted. So, a persuasion indifferent to the value of truth. Or else, like the geometer, the mathematician, the one who demonstrates in order to arrive at the solution. You see, here's a very good example of how contradiction is not something marginal, as we saw earlier.
33:35 Each person must first be in agreement with himself before then engaging in a genuine 'dia-logos,' dialectic. What does that mean first of all, 'dialectic'—one can always quibble and fill thousands of pages, but it first of all means this, right? So I recall the beautiful image, which comes from Plato incidentally, that when you strike two stones against each other, the spark doesn't come from the one in my left hand or the one in my right hand, but from their encounter. There. So I come now to the Merleau-Ponty text I alluded to—why am I bringing it up?
Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy: Bergson and the persecuted 34:09 Even though he doesn't begin by speaking of Socrates. I'll tell you right away, it's a lecture given in the 1950s, called the inaugural lecture that one must give at the Collège de France when, for the first time, one speaks there before that magnificent assembly that is the Collège de France. And he begins by praising a philosopher who had enormous importance at the time and who was Bergson. Excuse me, but there it is—Bergson.
34:41 So, I tell you right away, just for your information, that Bergson was the darling of what we would now call reactionary circles. I'm not saying anything bad about Bergson. I'm saying something bad about the Bergsonians. That's very different. Bergson is not much better than the Bergsonians, believe me. One must be honest. And Bergson—Jewish, you'll see why I mention this, because it matters for understanding what follows—strongly defended intuition against concept, right, imagination against reason, made people understand that time, the true depth of time, of duration, that we experience inwardly when we listen to a piece of music, has nothing to do with the time of physicists, of mathematicians.
35:25 In short, things that delighted those who are annoyed by the progress of science, by progress in general. That's why reactionaries were thrilled that a spiritualist, quasi-religious, profound thought took its revenge on three centuries of unacceptable materialist attacks. I'm not taking sides one way or the other. It happens that the Pétain regime wanted to award him honors—him, a Jew. Right? So, I tell you this for context, to understand, and now I'll read to you—I think many of you will make the connection with Socrates before it's even made explicit by Merleau-Ponty himself.
36:02 Isn't that so? Philosophy cannot be a tête-à-tête of the philosopher with the true. Up to here, he was speaking of philosophy in general, he hadn't yet spoken of Bergson. Philosophy cannot be a tête-à-tête of the philosopher with the true, as I spoke earlier of the astrologer—a judgment passed from on high on life, on the world, on history, as if the philosopher were not part of the world, of life, of history. And it cannot, philosophy, subordinate the truth inwardly recognized to any external authority, be it even the city.
36:39 Because what we've just seen is indeed the putting to death of the first philosopher by the city. That's how the history of philosophy begins. And people say it's not political. It must move beyond this alternative. Bergson sensed this well. His will of 1937—note the era—his will of 1937, after declaring that his reflections had, I quote Bergson, he quotes Bergson, brought him closer and closer to Catholicism, his convictions had led him to be convinced that he ought to convert to Catholicism, to the religion of his loved ones, right, to Catholicism.
37:22 He adds these words which pose our problem. Now we'll finally get there. 'I would have converted'—excuse me, there's an erasure, there—'had I not seen being prepared for years'—1937—'the formidable wave of antisemitism that is about to break over the world.' We haven't yet heard of the camps at this point, right? 'I wanted to remain among those who will tomorrow be persecuted.'
37:54 We know that he kept his word, even to the point of refusing, despite illness and age—he was already old—the exemptions that a power shameful of its own principles wanted to grant this illustrious Jew. Admirable text by Merleau-Ponty, isn't it? So, no baptism—secret, despite the legend, despite the underlying assent—it's here that we see how Bergson conceived our relations with truth. Assent to the truths that an institution may hold—here the city, here in Socrates's case, or a church—cannot release the philosopher from this pact of history concluded between him and tomorrow's persecuted.
38:35 Conversion would be a desertion, and adherence to Christianity, in the eyes of the public, the churches, etc., cannot prevail over the god who is hidden in suffering and persecuted. One might say: if the philosopher truly thinks that a church holds the secrets of life and the instruments of salvation, he cannot better serve others than by serving it without reservation. Yes, says Merleau-Ponty, but that is doubtless the hypothesis rendered vain by the very choice he made.
39:06 Bergson attests that for him there is no place of truth where one must go seeking it at all costs, even by breaking human relations and the bonds of life and history. Great text. Our relation, now—I ask you to be even more attentive, because I'm delighted that you are, but even more so for the passage that's coming, because it's a bit more abstract but it's magnificent. Our relation with the true passes through others. I tell you right away that we'll see three terms—that already makes two.
Myself, others, the true 39:36 Our relation with the true passes through the other, others. Either we go toward the true with them, or it is not toward the true that we are going. But the height of the difficulty is that if the true is not an idol, others in turn are not gods. It's not enough for me to be with my buddies at the corner café discussing the match between Marseille and PSG, right, to be in the truth.
40:11 But the height of the difficulty is that if the true is not an idol, others in turn are not gods. There is no truth without them, so that stands, but it is not enough, to attain the true, to be with them. So there are three elements. There's me, others, the true. It's this triangle that Merleau-Ponty gets us to reflect on so admirably. One can make combinations: if there's me with others without the true, that's opinion, that's the corner café.
40:41 That's the nice side of things—me, I don't disdain it. There's the nice side, the corner café. You can dazzle your buddies, buy the round. Fine, that's all right. But it's not the place of truth. That's me with others without the true. It can also be me with the true without others. I respect that. That's the mystic, the religious hermit. You see the column in the middle, the stub of a column? There were some who climbed very high and lived up there, you know, those who lived atop a column with a rope—food was sent up there—and who lived far from the world.
41:15 Atop a column—we say a 'style' in Greek, stulos, a column—hence you call them stylites. There. I respect that. But it's not philosophy. You see? It's profound. So you see, we really need all three. There is no truth without them, but it's not enough, to attain the true, to be with them. I'll skip some passages that would waste our time.
41:49 The philosopher will never accept to want himself against men, nor men against himself or against the true, nor the true against them. That, nowadays, is fashionable—truth against humanity. Humanity is the worst thing there is. Nature is divine. Man is hell. That's what I hear in the media. Excuse me, but there it is. Man is truly the animal that has rotted being, right, existence and the cosmos. I saw a kid, poor boy, he was 19 at a party—someone kindly invited me, they call me out onto a balcony like that, where the party was—'don't hold your phone to your temple, you'll get leukemia.'
42:32 It's terrible, isn't it, the alienation we're dealing with, but the poor kid said, for me, the worst thing in the world is man. It's terrible when at 19 you come out with something like that. So when Merleau-Ponty says that the philosopher will never accept to want himself against men, nor men against himself or against the true, nor the true against them, he wants to be everywhere at once, at the risk of never being quite anywhere. We saw this clearly with Socrates.
43:02 His opposition is not aggressive; he knows that this often heralds capitulation, but he understands too well the rights of others and of the outside world to allow them any encroachment whatsoever. There. And here, he's not speaking of Socrates. We're getting to it. If we have recalled these few words of Bergson, which are not all found in his books, it's because they make one feel what is uneasy in the philosopher's relations with others or with life, and that this unease is essential to philosophy.
Plato's Seventh Letter and the philosophical detour 43:33 The putting to death we've just seen, the putting to death of the wisest man of the city by the city. A small parenthesis here: Plato, who was a young man, I told you, of the establishment—I won't say a gilded youth, but he could have ended up like that. It was an aristocratic family, actually called Aristocles. Plato is a nickname because he had broad shoulders at the stadium, he was strapping. I say that as I'd love to have a quarter of his shoulders. Plato was destined, like the young men of that milieu, for a political career.
44:08 He had everything for it. Instead, he devoted himself entirely to philosophy, and he did so admirably, right, without hiding it, far from it. In fact, I mean, throughout his work he paid homage to Socrates, whom he makes speak the way Agatha Christie makes Hercule Poirot speak, or nearly so, right, to untangle the most difficult problems and enigmas. Now, in these dialogues in particular, I'm commenting here on the fact that the unease, the tragedy we've just seen.
44:57 Plato left us some letters. It's very, very rare to have correspondence dating back 2,500 years. It's exceptional, but Plato had already been the object of such veneration in his own time that there were fortunately many copies made. We've kept a few letters. And in the seventh letter—I'll give you the reference, all this is documented on Wikisource—the seventh letter of Plato, which he writes to his own circle, where he recounts his political setbacks. He had had a political failure; he had been recruited as a consultant, we'd say today, as a super-consultant at the court of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse.
45:32 Tyrant meant king at that time, of the city of Syracuse in Sicily. And then after a while, the Tyrant quickly saw that if he followed Plato's advice, I don't know, it didn't suit his way of life at all. He condemned him, sold him as a slave, you see. And fortunately Plato had connections with the family, and he was freed for a sum of money. And in this letter he recounts a bit of his political setbacks. Where am I getting at with this? At what Merleau-Ponty has just said about the fact that it's not only Socrates who had problems with the city—it's structural to all of philosophy whenever it advances during these great periods.
46:06 It's that in this letter, he says—having said that my eyes, having said that I remained drawn to a political career—I was as if forced to turn instead toward philosophy. And when he says forced, he uses a Greek word that all specialists know carries almost the force of a curse. You see? That's interesting. It took a misfortune, a tragedy, for this young man from a good family to suddenly turn away, faced with what he admirably calls, in the Republic, an immense detour.
46:42 In the Republic, where he wants to solve the political problem, and where he ends up understanding that for that, my friend, he says to the one he's dialoguing with, we must take an immense detour. So the modern philosopher is often a civil servant, always a writer—including Merleau-Ponty, proof of that—and the freedom left to him in his books comes with a price. What he says enters straight away into an academic universe where life's options are cushioned, there's the book on a shelf in a library, you see, and the occasions for thought are veiled.
47:16 So Merleau-Ponty doesn't mean—one might think he's speaking ill of writing. Without books, a certain agility of communication would have been impossible, and there's nothing to say against them. But all this to comment on the fact that Socrates left none behind. But they are, after all, only more coherent forms of speech. Now, philosophy set down in books has ceased to address men the way Socrates did in the city. Tell me, you, you who are an artist, tell me what you call beauty.
47:49 You must know that. You see? There, in the street, as he said earlier, among the merchants. What is unusual and almost unbearable in philosophy has hidden itself away in the decent life of the great systems. To rediscover the full function of the philosopher—well, that's revolutionary—even today Merleau-Ponty calls on us to renew Socrates' gesture. We must remember that even the philosopher-authors that we read, and that we are, since he wrote, have never ceased to recognize as their master a man who did not write, who did not teach, at least not from state chairs, who addressed those he met in the street, who had troubles with public opinion and with the authorities.
Hegel: Plato, pivot of world revolution 48:38 We must remember Socrates. That's a revolution. There. Another small illustration, a different one, but in his philosophical and even political testament, since it concerns the Philosophy of Right, the philosopher Hegel, who mattered so much in Marx's youth. You see, we're talking about revolution.
49:11 Hegel, who is reputed on one point to be a conservative, and on the other, on the contrary, to be the most caustic of philosophers—but let's leave that aside, it would take us too far. Hegel, at the end of the preface of his last great published work, the Philosophy of Right, which everyone agrees is his political testament—it's the mirages, it's the gusts, all right, I'm starting to get used to it—Hegel suddenly, right at the point of finishing his preface, with only two pages left, suddenly invokes Plato.
49:52 Across a gap of 2,500 years, the one who begins the history of philosophical systems, Plato, and the one who is supposed to close it, Hegel, sees them as if seated at either end of an immense banqueting table, greeting one another. But let's be more precise—he says this, speaking of Plato's Republic, Plato's political work par excellence, the one where you have to know how the city should be changed for things to go better. It hasn't lost its relevance. Hegel says: generally, this book passes for the typical example of what's called utopia—here's what should be done to have an ideal city, and so on.
50:36 There, all one needs do, all one needs do—what's called in philosophy, in slightly more abstract and technical terms, an 'ought to be.' There is science, which studies being, what is, the stars, whether you like it or not, that's how it happens. And then there are those who, I don't know, say, here's what things should be, you see, because Hegel criticizes this, as does Spinoza incidentally. And Hegel says: that's a misreading. It looks like a utopia, here's what should be done. But in fact, he says, in this work Plato expresses the essence of the political world in which he lived, sometimes even without knowing it himself.
51:10 And he proved he was a great mind because, he says, the direction in which he oriented his initiative, his entire philosophy—and here, I quote, you'll see the connection with revolution—is the pivot of the world revolution that was then being prepared. Colon: and here is Hegel's most famous sentence, the real is rational, the rational is real. You see, when I bring together—and I thank Bertrand for having put on the program this problem of the link between the Socratic initiative, the appearance of philosophy, and the fact that philosophy is therefore revolutionary in its very essence, in the fact that it comes to sow discord like that, you've seen it well, somewhere, but not discord for the malicious pleasure of it...
The dogmatist and the skeptic 52:03 the philosopher is neither a skeptic nor a dogmatist. I'd like to hand the floor over to you, but I don't want to do so before finishing on this... this strange companionship whereby, from its origins to today, the philosopher is always flanked, so to speak, by two figures who are completely opposed: the one who, to the question 'what can I know,' says everything—the dogmatist—and then the one who says nothing—the skeptic. Isn't that so?
52:33 In both cases, in both cases, what they have in common is that philosophical inquiry is useless: if I know everything, why should I go looking to know? You see? And the other one who says all inquiry is useless because nothing can be known. So in fact he spares himself the essential thing, which is inquiry. A fine example of dialectic. If you want to do dialectics, try to see what two camps that seem to oppose each other from end to end have in common. Look at what's common between them. Come on, since it's important, I'll give a second example. What do you call beauty? Well, the dogmatist will say, 'Look at the Parthenon, that's beauty!'
53:06 All right? Socrates will say, 'Isn't the sunset beautiful too? Yes, it's very beautiful, it has nothing to do with the Parthenon.' Ah yes, that's true. Damn! Well, you see, Socrates is troubled by this. At the same time, he can't deny it without contradicting himself. That's the dogmatist. He probably hasn't traveled much outside Athens. And then there's the skeptic, who no doubt has traveled a great deal, who says, 'In southern Africa, there are steatopygous women, as they're called, you know, with enormous curves, and that's the criterion of beauty there.'
53:38 So the criterion of beauty of the Venus de Milo, well, that's valid for you. That's how the skeptic talks. Relativism is very fashionable. That's valid for us, but not for the Bantu. Well. As if the Bantu didn't want their children to be healthy. I ask him, forgive me, but I spent 34 years south of the Sahara, and it pains me to hear that. When I saw businessmen who'd say to me, 'Tell me, Pagani, you who know Africa well—should we leave a tip, all that. Well, anyway. But tell me a bit about their mentality, you see, because for business it could be useful.'
54:16 I would tell them, listen, they want what I just told you. They wanted their children to be healthy, their wives too—they were disappointed when I said all that. Oh shoot! They were asking me for a particularity, an identity, and I give them the universal. What a disappointment! You see, it's serious, isn't it? So I wanted to recall this—I'll continue with it in two words to finish—the skeptic and the dogmatist.
Against the extreme center 54:47 The skeptic has traveled a bit more, he relativizes, and then comes the philosopher. You'll see he doesn't just make a little compromise between the two, the way Macron is trying to do right now with France. No! It's not an attiéké, as they say, a dish from Ivory Coast, where you take a bit of this sauce, mix it together... No, that's not it, that's the centrists. That's the extreme center. All those who collaborated back in the day, during the war, we later found them somewhere among the various moderates, unaffiliated, without a label.
55:22 You remember those who lived through that period, don't you? It's always the center—take a segment AB, take the midpoint, the center M, paint AM red and MB blue, and you'll see the middle turns purple, you never know who you're dealing with. Watch out. That's why I say the extreme center. They pass themselves off as moderates while being extremists—be careful. There.
55:53 You think I'm making a Marxist revolutionary critique, but no, what I just said is in the Gospel. It's not always contradictory... well, in the Gospel there's that admirable passage in the Epistle, in the letter to the church, I believe, of Smyrna, where it says: listen to what the Spirit says to the churches, you are neither cold nor hot, you are lukewarm, and that is why I vomit you out. Isn't that beautiful? So, the philosopher will say to one: you're looking for it, you say it's the Parthenon, and to the other: you say there's no such thing as beauty, there's as much beauty as there are individuals—that's relativism.
From aesthetic pleasure to desire: know thyself 56:29 In fact, both of you have one thing in common: you're looking for it with your eyes. Yes or no? Except one of them has seen only the beauty of Athens, and the other has seen bits of beauty everywhere, and since they contradict each other, are different, as a result there's no more beauty at all. All right? And the philosopher will say: wait, when you say something is beautiful, you'll see, we're going to replace things with words, the things we see with the words we say. When you say it's beautiful, is it because it pleases you? Well, obviously! I'm sketching a little Platonic dialogue. If it pleases you, is it because you feel pleasure? Well yes, come on, you're making me repeat myself.
57:00 If you feel pleasure, it's because the beautiful object has just satisfied a desire in you. Do you know of a pleasure that isn't linked to a desire? 'Billions of blue blistering barnacles'—Captain Haddock, when he insults people, calls them 'ectoplasms.' For drinking to be a pleasure, you have to be thirsty, isn't that so? You all know that the first sip is the best, the more water you drink, the less delicious it becomes. There! It's mathematical, it follows necessarily, as mathematicians would say.
57:30 If I feel pleasure, it's because a desire has been satisfied. Except—and this is the aesthetic pleasure, this is the difference from all the others—the pleasure I get from holding in my hands a hammer I bought, well, I know what I want to do with it: drive in a nail without hitting my thumb or without the handle going one way and the metal the other. That, I know, I know the purpose of that hammer. But here, why does this shirt please me? I don't know. You see? That's interesting. But it's humbling.
58:00 The object is more than me. The shirt is something of myself. It's not a desire of mine that I wasn't conscious of until then, but which the object reveals to me. There. That's to show you what progress that is. And so I'll finish my example on beauty. There's the dogmatist who says beauty is the Parthenon. The skeptic who says beauty doesn't exist. And there's the philosopher who introduces rationalism and who, as a result, dismisses both the dogmatist and the skeptic together as empiricists, those who rely only on what the senses see, in order to go looking inside oneself—know thyself—for the desire that makes you say something pleases you.
58:41 There. I wouldn't want to take up too much of the time we have. And besides, I forgot to say that this time, I owe it to you, I owe it to the UPSD, whom I thank infinitely. I'm always very happy. At my age, I'm always afraid of dying before seeing Saint-Dizier again. So I prefer to have pleasant surprises rather than false hopes. That's clever too. But there, once again, thank you a thousand times for being here. And I would love to hear some of your comments both on the piece and on the philosophical assessment that I've tried, more or less confusedly, to draw from it.
59:23 There. Thank you a thousand times in any case.
