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 resumption of the cycle 0:00 Good evening everyone. It's a miracle of technology, and above all a miracle of human beings, that we find ourselves together again this evening, to my great delight, and I hope it also matches, I'm sure of it for some of you given the comments, your expectations. I'll start right away by thanking, not Pierre-Alain as usual, I could never thank him enough, but Pierre-Alain has abandoned us.
0:38 No, no, we've been abandoned geographically because, fortunately for him, for important professional reasons he's tied up on a project in the South China Sea. No, I won't say more about it, for a shoot. And I'm delighted this gives me the chance to see again the person standing in for him this evening. He's an old acquaintance of yours, even though he's quite young.
1:08 I'm thinking of Victor Sarkis, a brilliant philosopher — I'll make him blush, but I stand by it. And with whom, if you recall, we made a video together that stirred up quite a few of your reactions, more often for the better than for the worse. It was on the relationship between Marx and Engels, an opportunity that arose for me to film something with him, in dialogue form, as part of a blog you know well, which we owe to our friend Benjamin Leloy, namely the one he founded, I think, called 'Au gros rouge qui tache.'
2:01 We had made a video on the relationship between Marx and Engels following an excellent article that Victor had just had published in L'Initiative communiste. There you go. And I'm also thinking of all those who know him from his regular publications, quite independent of our own association, because although he isn't retired like me and already has plenty to do with his teaching job, he's also a great activist.
2:33 In fact, I invite those who can, those who aren't too far away, to attend — I think it's tomorrow, Victor, correct me — a talk he's giving on the thought of Georg Lukács, isn't that right? That reference which is familiar to you, to us, as it was to our dear Clouscard. So, there we'll be, three authors from Éditions Delga.
3:10 I'm almost ashamed to put myself alongside Lukács, all the same — first, I have great admiration, but there you go: Lukács, Victor Sarkis, and myself. So, I have quite a few things to give you, pieces of information first, before we get into our properly philosophical part. We resumed our in-person sessions on October 14th. And it's understood that we've decided to take up this exercise again on a monthly basis, as we used to do before the lockdown, isn't that right?
3:50 So we should, in a few days, in mid-November, have episode number 2, right? We won't be able to, because the whole Goscinny center is requisitioned for musical activities that are taking up all the center's rooms. So we're trying, even Pierre-Alain, remotely from the Far East, is using his connections to help us find what?
4:22 A venue, quite simply, a substitute one, just for this second edition, which will therefore be held in the second half of November, or later, I mean, between the 15th and the end of November. That said, it's understood that we'll then get our space back, of course, from December onward, at the Goscinny center, in the 13th arrondissement. And, since this school year, as I also do between two in-person sessions — you know this vocabulary annoys me, that's why I'm a bit clumsy talking about it — like what we're doing today, a recording that allows you, allows us, to stay in touch, which is the most important thing, isn't it, especially given the speed at which the historical-political present is catching up with us, isn't it, it's not too much
5:33 to also have, between the monthly sessions, a biweekly session, there we go. This one being the second since the start of the year. The third, actually, because there was one presentation session, one Q&A session, and today, so, the third. So we're continuing the series that opened this school year on, I told you, if you go back to it — I say this because some of you join in each time, jumping on the moving train, so out of courtesy to them, even if it may annoy those who know it by heart — I recall that, since the start of the year, if you look closely at the introductory video, I had announced that if we had to sum it up in one word, which is always a bit idle, a bit abstract even, but if we had to sum it up in one word, at least to get a clear view of the theme that will occupy us during this new 2022-2023 cycle, if one word could sum it up, it's hesitation.
Hesitating out of humility, against the Gordian knot 6:41 And I would gladly have added, as a backdrop, though it would almost be redundant, humility — hesitating out of humility, not hesitating in the sense of testing whether the ice is solid enough to walk on, no, that's not the sense of hesitation I mean, it's hesitating out of scruple too, hence out of humility, that is, not hesitating to realize that one has gone down the wrong path, that one can turn back — that's something I admire enormously, for example in someone who isn't an absolute reference for me, even though I'm thinking of Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, of course.
7:28 When I say he's not an absolute reference, that's not at all — and first of all, I have no absolute reference, let it be said in passing, I'd rather cling on that way. Some people have Lacan as an absolute reference, some have Kant, some have Marx, some have Hegel — that's fine, as for me, every morning I have references like that, you know most of them, whether philosophical, literary, or musical references, we know each other — but by evening, I question it again, I tell myself, you see, I've found plenty of counter-arguments, there — I admire that even more in Freud, it's the humility with which he says, 'I say this, but it's not certain, it's rather speculative, I can't ground it as I usually do on an experimental basis,' meaning with all the subjects he dealt with, who seem to parade like that, with their individual diversity on my couch — it's me doing a prosopopoeia, a voice-over, but which in fact always tells the same things, I'm extending a bit
8:38 this Freudian parenthesis to say that Freud used to say — one wonders whether I'm not obsessed with always coming back to elements of the libido, of sexuality, it's not me, it's that I'd like him to talk to me about something else, but it always comes back to that, you see, either directly, or indirectly through the symbolic order. Let's get back to our 2022-2023 cycle — I was saying hesitation, but not in the psychological sense, that can be a reference point just so we understand each other, like 'he's hesitating,' in any case the opposite of one who, as they say of Alexander the Great, cuts the Gordian knot — that's the opposite of indecision, I say this for those — since I'm going to speak like an old reactionary — our children too, the transmission of the great humanist tradition, no, I'm not joking, there was good in it and there was less good, and then it was reserved for an elite so confined, statistically and numerically speaking, isn't it, that it too had plenty to reconsider, because one easily falls asleep when kept among one's own kind,
9:48 isn't it, and when one isn't fertilized by otherness. So, I recall this anecdote of the Gordian knot, the legend, because after a certain time there must have been, of course, some authentic core to it — when Alexander really begins, he doesn't content himself, as his father did in subjugating Athens, coming down from the north, from the semi-barbarous Macedonia — the Macedonians were less refined, so to speak, than the Greeks, weren't they — but they subjugated them militarily.
10:32 And the Macedonian phalanx — no, here Alexander takes on the whole known world, as it was understood at the time, that is, he crosses the Bosphorus, he takes a boat, and in the last few meters, before landing in Asia, he throws his javelin, doesn't he, and takes Asia as land of conquest, and you know what follows, it will become one of the greatest empires — but not far along, on the road that must lead him to the Persian capitals, with whom he is at war, on that side of the Bosphorus, there is a place where there's an enormous knot of ropes that has been there since time immemorial, and it's set as a challenge at the entrance to cities, you know, there are obstacles, trials, like Oedipus, before entering Thebes, he has to answer the Sphinx's riddles — well, here there's this knot, and everyone has to try to undo it, isn't that so — it's not only
11:42 that it's complex like sailors' knots, or like the wigs of seamstresses or tailors — in Africa, it's the men who do the sewing, on the eve of festivals, they don't sleep at night because they're preparing the robes, whether it's the eve of Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha, the end of the Ramadan fast — no, it's not only a knot hard to undo because of the complexity of its threads and its intricacies, but also because of the enormous age of the ropes, which makes it almost mineralized, there — everyone who tried failed to undo it. Alexander, who is the complete opposite of your humble servant — I mean, of the philosopher in general — that is, someone who is not hesitating, doubting, isn't he, he's a man of action.
12:32 Alexander draws his sword and cuts the knot, and ever since, it's become the expression used when someone suddenly makes a decision, isn't it, that allows one to get out of a deadlock — we say, he cut the Gordian knot. I'm sorry, but coffee is my last remaining vice since my heart trouble forbade me from indulging in others.
Philosophy born of crisis and of ordinary language 13:03 No, no, I've never been a heavy drinker, don't worry. So, there we are, hesitation in the sense that it's immanent to the practice of philosophy. You know, Socrates's interlocutors compared the founder of philosophy — I didn't say of thought, I never repeat enough that there is an Eastern thought, a Far Eastern one, Chinese, Hindu, Mesopotamian, Semitic, well prior to the Socratic initiative, of sometimes unfathomable depth, even if that word doesn't mean much, in any case of a richness that has inspired many philosophies — but it's not just philosophy, it's thought, deep thought.
13:50 I prefer a deep thought to a superficial philosophy — it's not a value judgment when I say it's not philosophy, it's not to dismiss it — what is specific starting with Socrates, as you've often heard me say, and we come back to our subject, because when I began by saying in one word it's hesitation, but why? Because we were catapulted into hesitation from our reflections and from what I've tried to make apparent to you about the difficulties of what linguists call the language I'm speaking with you right now, or rather of language itself, because it's not a particular language — the language is French, but even if I suddenly decided to give my philosophical talk in Russian, in English, in Swahili, or in Bororo, it would remain natural language, it wouldn't be Y equals F of X implies equals, no, it wouldn't be mathemes or algorithms, it would still be words, it would still be logos.
14:57 What does that have to do with hesitations, you'll ask me? Here we are, here we are, and you'll see that it's not just splitting hairs — you see I try to remain polite — that I'm insisting on the ambivalence of everyday words, because plenty will tell me, 'Come on, if I tell you watch out, there's a stop sign, you're not going to tell me there's a stop sign, of course.' But there, we're no longer in the realm of knowledge, we're in the realm of action. Let's not mix things up. On the other hand, let me simply remind you — I use the same examples again for the sake of newcomers who join us, which has the merit of being very clear.
15:38 When I say 'the day is breaking, the sun is rising,' there I'm speaking ordinary language, I'm not in an entirely formalized language — and thankfully formalized, because that allows the hard sciences to make prodigious advances in their applications, which mean that if we ourselves are in good health, alive, and our children too, we owe it to them. I say this for the obscurantists and the degrowthers and the back-to-the-past reactionaries.
16:09 isn't that so? And when I think that some dare to claim Rousseau, one of your references, as if Rousseau himself had said that all this, the sciences and the arts, had led us into dead ends — we'll read Rousseau a bit later, you'll see that's not quite how Jean-Jacques expresses himself, far from it. But let me get back to my story about language. The day is breaking. I'm not doing astronomy when I say that.
16:42 I'm not in the realm of science. I'm in poetry, in metaphor. The day hasn't risen. It hasn't set. It doesn't need to rise. It's not the sun that moves, it's us. Ah yes, that's true, that's true. But yes, we forget it all the time because we fall back into the habits of everyday language. Which isn't a problem. We understand each other perfectly well when I say, 'It's time you hurried up a bit because the day is breaking and given the traffic jams waiting for you.'
17:13 You see? No, no. For immediate, practical reasons. Ah, but if life were always a practice unfolding without hitches or problems, we wouldn't need philosophers. We wouldn't need philosophy. You see how we're revising here. There has to be a crisis for philosophy to arise. It took the crisis of the Greek city-state, precisely under the blows of Alexander of Macedon, of his father Philip first, then Alexander, isn't it, for Socrates to spread through the streets of Athens.
17:48 it took feudalism, the feudal-aristocratic monarchy, to be at its end, at the end of the 18th century, and for Rousseau to be able to say, from the 1760s, in the middle of the 1760s, in Émile, 'We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions.' It took this fruitful crisis, since it would give birth to the modern world in which we find ourselves and to which I return so often in order to better understand our youth and better frame the problems being debated within it, by recalling the context from which these questions arise.
18:45 Yes. Because some would say to me, 'So, if we understand each other when we say the day is breaking, why are you going to start saying that everyday language is ambiguous?' No, if it's just to say you have to go to work, yes, that's enough. But that's not at all the set of mechanisms by which we suddenly passed from night to day. It would take millennia of patience, effort, and the birth of science, of astronomy, to understand that the sun doesn't rise, it doesn't set. That's not how it happens.
Perceval mute before the Grail and the mouth of the ogre 19:16 It's for our vision that we have this illusion of the observer placing himself at the center. This matters, what I'm saying. It justifies the fact that when we've taken blows, we hesitate to start again. At our next in-person session, which I've announced to you, whether at the same venue or at a substitute location we'll find, I intend to do a sustained reading of several passages from a magnificent text, one of the most beautiful there is, that I have never analyzed with you, whose author is one of the greatest authors of our poetry and perhaps even the founder of poetry in the French language — I'm thinking of Chrétien de Troyes and I'm thinking of his mysterious last masterpiece,
20:26 unfinished, Perceval, or The Story of the Grail. He says, indeed, in the opening lines of this magnificent poem, and I intend for it to be narrated as if at a royal court, 'This is the story of the Grail.' And yes, yes, I know that interests a lot of people, but maybe some of you will be very... will be disappointed about... Excuse me, I keep trying to put...
21:05 Ah, there we go, I couldn't manage to put it on airplane mode, it's fine now. There we go. So, yes, I'll tell you right away why I'm going to use this text as a reference, because there is — and I'm telling you this as a preview, before we tackle this text — there is a magnificent passage where Perceval, who at this point is on a quest for adventure, still quite young, has only just left, I was about to say his mother's apron strings, he's not from the...
21:39 he has only just left his mother's castle deep in the forest — she raised him far, far, far, far away from men, from wars, from battles, because she lost her husband, who had gone off to wage war in the East — in short, she doesn't want her son to become a knight so he doesn't perish like the object of her immense love, her husband, Gahmuret, and so she raised him like a little wild child in the forest, isn't that so? Listen closely, because you'll see how a structure takes shape here that will recur throughout our literary, pictorial, and musical expressions — the one who has remained, who has stayed long within the maternal enclosure, isn't that so?
22:24 who has trouble getting out of it. One day he decides to leave, because you know what a forbidden fruit is — his mother forbids him from going anywhere near, far or especially near, anything related to knighthood, for fear of losing him, and one day he sees some knights passing in the distance, he follows them, he turns around a little, sees his mother swooning, he goes on anyway and leaves. And later, when he sees the Grail, he will see the Grail appear in a mysterious castle, the castle of the Grail King, the Fisher King — I'm going quickly, don't worry, we'll come back to the details — when everyone will be waiting for him to ask the question, the question that would lift the curse on the world.
23:15 And his mouth remains silent — you see the hesitation — he who is, I don't know, someone who can cut an opponent to pieces in a tournament, and shatter all his armor pieces, and pulverize his armor — there, in front of the marvel, he hesitates to open his mouth. You see, we're not far from the problems of language. And since I'm on this topic, I won't leave the character of Perceval yet — even as a preview, I'll come back to him — for a second anecdote, but since I'm here, I recall that I had an excellent friend who was preparing for the agrégation in literature.
23:56 And we often discussed the texts on her syllabus, and in the exam — a very fine exam in comparative literature, so called — it's organized by theme each year, it changes, I believe, every two years, or every year, I don't remember — that year the theme was the tale. The tale, like fairy tales for children, isn't it? And in the excellent lectures she was receiving in that vein, one of their professors had told them that the recurring figure of the ogre, so frequent in the tale, might be due to a hesitation — as we come back to it — a hesitation of the mouth, a strange organ where several functions compete to see who will use it: is the mouth the organ of speech?
24:56 Everyone will say yes, of course, what are you getting at? Ah yes, it's also the organ of nutrition, ah yes, that's true, gosh, speaking and eating at the same time, that's not easy, is it? Not only because it risks causing aerophagia, and breathing. Three vital functions, isn't it? Well, two vital in the strict biological sense, breathing and eating, and then one function vital for the human animal, that is, for the animal that speaks, for the logos, competing for the same passage through the mouth.
25:34 Well, the figure of the ogre, according to the teaching she received that year, would be due to the fact that it's the mouth of someone who hesitated between speaking and eating, and who couldn't manage to get to speaking, from hesitating too much. You see? Hesitation is a serious matter. Let me get back to Perceval. When he sees the Grail, his mouth will remain silent.
26:04 And it will take him — I'll tell you now, because this isn't quite a detective story, so there are stakes even more interesting than those of a detective story. Detective fiction is very interesting literature. But here, I can tell you it will take many adventures and thousands of verses before a wise man, as they say, a hermit in the forest, finally tells him that the reason he stays silent each time, and doesn't speak when he should speak, at the moment when we expect him to say something, is because he is bound by the memory he has of the mother he left behind.
26:39 He went ahead anyway, despite her misfortune, and she died of grief seeing him leave. And somehow, that gnaws at him and has left him bound up. You see? So when I speak of hesitation, you see, I'm setting it against decision, just as one day he made the decision to leave the maternal castle, as Alexander cuts the Gordian knot — it's this back-and-forth between hesitation and decision that will occupy us during this cycle.
Socrates' torpedo fish and Cartesian doubt 27:14 and I'll take the opportunity to say that it's immanent to philosophy. I spoke to you of Socrates earlier and made that long digression. Now I can say why hesitation is immanent to the origins and to the very principle, in this double sense, chronologically, at the origin, with Socrates, but also every time we want to do philosophy again, seriously, and make new advances, we run up against the same hesitation — which one?
27:49 The one that made Socrates's interlocutors say — and now I'll finish this anecdote — that the way he asked questions made him comparable to the torpedo fish. You know, the torpedo fish, a kind of ray that, when you touch it, gives you an electric shock that numbs you, so that you no longer know what to say, no longer know how to respond. And Socrates would say, 'Yes, yes, you're suffering, but that's a good sign, it means you're giving birth, these are the pains of labor, they're not deadly or sterile pains, they're fruitful pains.'
28:26 You're going to give birth to new knowledge. So if I take hesitation in that sense, you see how we started from hesitation and arrived at the problem of language. Because the words of everyday language, as soon as we want to look at them closely — philosophy is nothing other than the effort to look a bit more closely at what we say in the heat of action. Once again: pass me the salt, watch out, there's a stop sign — I'm not going to tell you 'what do you mean by salt.'
28:56 there are plenty of circumstances where it would have been better to ask what one meant. I don't know whether that would spare you many misunderstandings, many dramas and tragedies. And you'll see that this link between hesitation and doubt, a fundamental category for someone as little inclined to it, on the face of it, as René Descartes — he was a warrior at first, since the function of aristocrats at the time was to make war, to sell their services to whatever sovereign, or to some petty or great duke in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation — I say this because it happened to him — who employed him professionally, so to speak, in war.
29:41 So he doesn't know them, and then he was attacked on a boat that was supposed to take him to Holland or England, I don't remember which, he actually did both, I think it was for Holland. And he was attacked by pirates, and he brought them all back to port at sword point. You don't think philosophers are dreamers while on the other side there are men of action? He handed them over to the authorities, to the police. So why am I suddenly bringing up Descartes in connection with doubt and the link between doubt and language?
Reading of Descartes' piece of wax 30:12 I'm not losing my thread. It's because I'm thinking of one of the passages, the most, I'll speak like journalists do, the most emblematic passages of the Cartesian corpus. I'm thinking of the famous passage often summed up by the phrase "the piece of wax," which is taken from the second meditation in the collection called the Metaphysical Meditations by Descartes, which had a resonance among the intelligentsia, among the thinkers of the time, that's hard to imagine now, when you look at another great work of Descartes, the Replies to Objections — objections sent by the greatest minds of the time, from England, Italy, France of course, concerning the cogito, the existence of God, the soul, the imagination, and so on.
31:09 In the second meditation, Descartes is talking about the notion of body, bodies in general, in the physical sense, if you will. And here he says it so well that I'll let him speak for himself: "Let us begin by considering the most common things, which we believe we understand most distinctly."
31:46 Now here, we're not in philosophy — I don't know, I'm talking, I have a camera, I have a coffee cup, I have the screen — he's talking about things like that. "Let us begin by considering the most common things" — we're not in metaphysics — "and which we believe we understand most distinctly, namely the bodies that we touch and that we see." You see, touch and sight — there will be several echoes of this, while we're at it, right?
32:18 In short, we're in what's been called, since Plato, the sensible world, that is, the one our senses put us in contact with. Always good to recall these fundamental notions, because people, I don't know if it's the real, if it's... In any case, what's certain is that it's what our senses put us in relation with. "Look, I dreamed last night that I saw my grandmother again, what happiness, my sense, it was imperishable, my grandmother." I saw her, I thought of her, but it wasn't the real, unfortunately, it wasn't the real.
32:54 The sensible — setting aside whether it corresponds, really, to truth or falsehood, that's a vast subject, which Descartes, he wasn't the first nor the last, far from it, to explore. So, namely the bodies that we touch and that we see. "I do not mean to speak of bodies in general" — what is a body in general? He doesn't want to be abstract here, for these general notions are usually more confused — "but of one in particular." Let's take, for example, this — the demonstrative, that means, it's there, there, at the tip of his index finger, the pointing, the index.
33:31 "Let us take this piece of wax" — here, we're in the here and now, this, here, now. You understand why there's wax? There was no electric company, there was a candle when he worked, when he wrote. And that candle was made, not with stearin, but — much more pleasant for the nose, isn't it, and for the senses — with real beeswax, in a ball, which you can still find in the countryside, right, or at organic shops, so to speak, to put it quickly.
34:07 So, it's wonderful. "Let us take, for example, this piece of wax which has just been taken from the hive. It has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey it contained" — there, for taste, in the sense of sweetness — "it has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey it contained, it still retains something of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered."
34:37 There, for smell. It's an admirable passage. "Its color, its shape, its size are apparent." He's multiplying all the ways of grasping it through the senses. "It is hard" — as opposed to soft, right? We're in sensations here, not in feelings, still less in ideas. "It is hard, it is cold," we touch it.
35:08 "If you strike it, it will give off some sound." In short, to sum up, all the things that can distinctly make a body known — what it resembles, what its smell is, what its color is, what its shape is — are found in this one. "But now, even as I speak, it is brought near the fire." What remained of its flavor evaporates, the smell of burning, its color changes, the white becomes yellow, its shape is lost, its size increases, heat expands bodies, it becomes liquid, it heats up, one can hardly touch it, and however much one strikes it, it will give off no sound at all.
36:02 Up to this point, there's nothing surprising, anyone can make this observation. And here we're going to see an immense philosopher — this is the question he suddenly asks. It's very simple. "Does the same wax remain after this change?" Out of gratitude toward all those who have kindly been following my talks for a long time, and there are so many who've left wonderful comments among the best, and whom I haven't answered, I have so many scruples, but I'm thinking of them.
36:39 I'll do special sessions to talk about that. Out of courtesy, for those among them — many of them say they sometimes get a bit lost in the abstraction, in the properly philosophical difficulties — let me reassure them here. "Does the same wax remain after this change?" It seems like such a simple question. But this is exactly where we enter philosophy. Because I have to give a reminder to reassure them that I haven't changed the subject.
37:10 We were on language. Why am I suddenly moving to Descartes, my friend? We're right in the middle of it. We'll see. Don't worry, in a few lines — the problem of language. "Does the same wax remain after this change?" We'll see. What is this piece of wax? We answered together with Descartes: it's something white, cube-shaped, that has a smell of honey, that has a taste of honey, that has a smell of flowers, of resin, if it's honey from a conifer forest, Black Forest honey, or lavender honey, no matter.
Naming and judging: the subject and its predicates 37:49 if it's a bit more toward the Mare Nostrum, our mother Mediterranean. That's how we've defined it. Now, all that has disappeared — so, he's right to say, do we still have to, you see, the language, call it wax. God gave Adam, in the earthly paradise, the privilege of naming the creatures.
38:21 That God doesn't exist changes nothing about the matter. It must be a devilishly important problem for it to be called a privilege, right? Not just speaking — because there are lots of animal species that strive to communicate through whistles, cooing, vibrations in the water, I'm thinking of cetaceans, over enormous distances. No, no, I'm not talking here about naming what is truly specific to language.
38:52 Not just any form of communication — bees communicate very well too. Where's the loot? How much of it is there? In what direction — all that's been studied. No, no, no. I'm talking about language, which is very different. Language — yes, this is a cup, this is a bowl, this is a bottle, this is an ashtray, this is a carafe. Yes, I'm staying within a family of container-objects, but already, look how names proliferate. The act of naming, which is perhaps the most fundamental thing for Plato, whereas for Aristotle it's rather judgment — I'm telling you this because it might allow some who valiantly continue their philosophy studies to get a little spark on a passage that might have seemed obscure to them, right?
39:37 Aristotle spent his life studying judgment, a bit like Kant, right? In particular, the importance for him of syllogistics — chains of judgments, you know, "all herrings are on the moon, Laurent is a herring, therefore Laurent is on the moon," which doesn't matter because what counts in judgment is not material truth, it's formal coherence — judgment, but concepts, naming, that's the concept: lion, computer, keyboard, cup of coffee — there, I'm in concepts.
40:23 If I say "feline," because I just saw my cat, I'm in concepts. And if I say "felines are mammals," with a subject "feline," a predicate "mammal," and a verb that joins the two, called for that reason the verb "to be," "are," the copula that makes a couple out of these two words which at first didn't seem linked at all — "felines are mammals."
40:53 There, we're in judgment. But that's not what I'm talking about — I'm not talking within language, there are the two. There are more often statements that judge. But here I'm talking about the state, the first state of primitive language, the one that makes us say, as Rilke says in a magnificent poem, "Are we here on this earth perhaps only to say: apples, pears, bananas" — to say, to name things by their name. So why am I dwelling on this a bit? Because everything by which we had given a predicate to the wax — what is this piece of wax?
41:30 It's something that is white, that smells of flowers, that tastes of honey, etc. All of that has disappeared. It's a smell of burning, the white has become yellowish, all that, because it was brought near a flame. So we shouldn't call it wax anymore if we make the subject depend on the predicate. The predicate has changed. How can I keep the same subject? You see, it's still abstract, but it speaks more now with this example, doesn't it? Extraordinary, this Descartes.
42:01 And so he continues, and he says this. Let me first go back to the moment of the break: "But now, even as I speak, it is brought near the fire, what remained of its flavor evaporates," in short, everything changes. "The smell vanishes, its color changes, its shape is lost, its size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats up. One can hardly touch it, and however much one strikes it, it will give off no sound at all." A clean break, I found it, I'll say it right out.
"Words stop me": from ordinary language to the concept 42:33 No, no, I'm not adding anything, this important question. "Does the same wax remain after this change?" Immediately after the question, I go on: "One must admit that it does remain, and no one can deny it." Good grief, my Descartes, who accustomed us to doubt everything, to carefully avoid — I quote, it's in the four rules of the method — to carefully avoid prejudice and hasty judgment. And here he rushes to say, but yes, it's the same, no one can deny it.
43:05 You see how he himself hesitates to leave the world everyone shares. Speech, the way everyone talks: "well yes, the wax was white, it's yellow, so what?" That's not enough for me to stop calling it wax. So I must define it differently than I had defined it, that is, through all the information given to me by the senses. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, look, look. "One must admit that it does remain, and no one can deny it."
43:36 "What then did I know" — and yes, he speaks in the past tense. Just now he was certain, now he's in hesitation, now he no longer knows, no longer recognizes. "What then did I know so distinctly in this piece of wax? Certainly it could be nothing of what I observed by means of the senses, since everything that fell under taste, smell, sight, touch, or hearing has changed, and yet the same wax remains."
44:06 You see, he maintains what's called the category of identity. Except that for us, it's become doubtful. Why do we keep calling it that when everything by which it was defined — I'm contradicting myself here, if you look at the truth. "Perhaps what I now think is that the wax was neither that sweetness of honey, nor that pleasant scent of flowers, nor that whiteness, nor that shape, nor that sound, but merely a body which a little while ago appeared to me under these forms, and which now makes itself known under others."
44:42 a bit vague, "under others." "But what exactly is it that I imagine when I conceive of it in this way?" I'll skip the rest of the demonstration because I don't want to lose track of my subject, or confuse you, regarding the relationship between hesitation and language. Watch closely, now we're getting there. "Yet I cannot cease to wonder" — at the time, "to wonder" is like the crack of thunder, it's very strong — "I cannot cease to wonder when I consider how weak and prone to error my mind is."
45:21 But by relying too much on ordinary ways of speaking and natural language — at least he admits that this inclines us to think weakly, because language isn't very precise. "For although, without speaking" — there we go, without speaking — "I consider all this within myself" — which makes some say that I'm not speaking, not using words, but thinking, as if one didn't want to think without words. We'll come back to that another time. "Words, however, hold me back." Admirable, that happens.
45:51 "And I am almost deceived by the terms of ordinary language." The first major in-person session I gave at the Centre Goscinny since the start of the term was devoted to Mr. Clouscard's reply to Claude Mordila — Mordila, sorry, excuse me. Actually, let me take this opportunity to apologize to him, because I'd gotten annoyed at always mangling his name whenever I repeated it, because it makes me think of someone else, actually.
46:28 So, in getting annoyed, I was unfair. I said, I don't see why I'm so insistent about what he told me. One doesn't joke around with him, I apologize retroactively. It's while reviewing the footage that I realized I'd committed this indelicacy toward someone who nonetheless deserves credit for being the first to give proper critical recognition to Clouscard's thought. Now, Clouscard said, at the very moment Claude Mordila raised the problems posed by his way of expressing himself, within Clouscard's own semantics, he said: how to move from ordinary ideological language to the necessity of the concept.
47:23 Comma, that's Socrates' problem. Incredible reply. Michel Clouscard suddenly claims a historical depth within the history of ideas, in any case tracing his metaphorical way of expressing himself back that far, like that. And yes, we're not at the CNRS. We're not speaking in equations or measurements. God knows, I don't mean any contempt in saying that.
The object of philosophy is a subject: "I am I" 47:53 "If you despise science and reason, the highest gifts of mankind, you give yourself over to the devil, and you are lost." I've quoted this magnificent line several times now, which you'll find in Goethe's Faust, where the Lord says this, right, because there's a prologue that takes place in Heaven: "If you despise science and reason." And this was said at a time when science was just barely beginning to babble.
48:25 "The highest gifts of mankind" were said to lead one to ruin and perdition. Don't make me say a word against the sciences. But philosophy has a different object than the so-called hard sciences, that is, the sciences devoted precisely to objects, because the object of philosophy is precisely an object so unlike others that it's called a subject. It is not a set of something. It's not stars. It's not protozoa.
48:55 It's not viruses under an optical or electron microscope. No! Or benefiting from electron optics, from optronics. No! The philosopher's motto is "know thyself." Say, the same phrase as "does the same wax remain after this change?" I'll take this opportunity, again, addressing myself here a bit less to the beginner than to the seasoned philosopher, to suggest to them that the principle of identity, which we saw last time, you and I — I'm putting everyone together — is at the very basis of scientificity, whatever the field, delicately put.
49:39 or the principle of identity, delicately put, which began with the propositions of the pre-Socratic Parmenides when he says: "what is, is; what is not, is not" — this is a mouse, there's nothing in between, well, no! This is what's called in the relevant literature the principle of excluded middle — "a" or "not-a," there is no excluded third between "a" and "not-a."
50:13 I have a criterion, this is important, what we're looking at right now. Well, we're revising things all of a sudden — I'm in the process of suggesting to my fellow philosophers that before saying "a equals a," the very formalized statement of the principle of identity — that a pear is a pear, that an apple is an apple — before saying "a equals a,"
50:49 one must first be able to say — one must first affirm one's identity to oneself, one must be able to say "I am I," which is what made a philosopher like Fichte say "ich bin ich" in German — that was famous at the time, right, and yes, this Fichte who had such an influence on our young men of Tübingen, on Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, yes, yes, because people tell me, "but that goes without saying," that I am I, what's the point of wasting time on that? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, or else you're suffering from amnesia, because we all have, somewhere, relatives, more or less close, more or less distant, who've had psychological problems, sometimes serious ones, and who are sometimes unable to affirm their own identity. Besides, you know this — take a comic book, take a Tintin: as soon as you see a madman, he's shown wearing a folded paper Napoleon hat on his head, and he says "I am Napoleon," "I am not I," "I is another," and you see, you see — well, there, we're talking about the subject.
Seeing and judging: the men at the window 51:59 I told you last time that we're in the realm of the dialectic starting from the moment the contradiction is internal, where it opposes the subject to itself — but not objects — and that's why the hard sciences, fortunately, didn't wait for philosophers to progress in their own field, which is not that of philosophy, even though some — who aren't scholars but scientistic ideologues — would like to annex all the objects of philosophy, right, with the same methods that have proven so effective, that have shown their efficacy with the stars or in curing the rabies bacillus. So I come back to this great distinction between things and someones, between objects and subjects, you see, that was the point of coming back to it. And here, Descartes, you see, despite the fact that he is by no means spontaneously someone who likes to doubt, who likes to hesitate — he's actually, and the words that recur often when you know Cartesian texts well, one that doesn't deceive, is the word of a man of action, nonetheless, once again: "I decided resolutely," "I took the firm and constant resolution."
53:09 Everyone here recognizes these passages, the high points of Cartesian texts, that lead him himself to say: "For although, without speaking, I consider all this within myself, words, however, hold me back." And yes, because I'm not in some café chatting idly — there's someone reflecting on what I'm saying, and it's there, by reflecting, by turning back on what I say, that I realize it doesn't hold up, and "I am almost deceived by the terms of ordinary language, for we say that we see the same wax" — I go on now — "if it is presented to us, and not that we judge it to be the same" — extraordinary — but you clearly see that it's the same wax that a moment ago was white and is now yellow — we don't see, precisely, we keep looking for what makes it the wax, yellow or white, etc., its identity, what persists through all these changes, we keep looking for it, so we don't see it, we won't look for it — but, but we judge.
54:20 that it's the same — it's not a seeing, look closely at this extraordinary passage, the distinction between seeing and judging here, "for we say that we see the same wax if it is presented to us," and not — as we should, properly speaking — "that we judge it to be the same, from the fact that it has the same color and the same shape" — from which I would almost like to conclude that one knows the wax by the vision of the eyes and not by the inspection of the mind, if by chance — he changes the example, even more striking, watch closely, I don't think I'm overstating it, watch closely, because we need to slow down, this is a rare moment in these texts — "if by chance I look out of a window," so he's looking out of his window at men passing by in the street, "at the sight of whom" — you too, me too, we'd say the same thing — "I do not fail to say that I see men" — the same way I say that I see the wax — "and yet what do I see?" Going back — not to the image, going back to the words, going back to my logos —
55:30 there I was saying "I see men," whether in my head or spoken aloud, what does it matter, they're words, it's a statement, right? "Now what do I see?" — let's really stick to what the eyes show, right — "and yet what do I see through this window but hats and coats," you know, it's like the musketeers, there were some, hats that covered things well, with capes and coats, right, there were coats — and this is only the beginning, it's extraordinary, right — "which might cover ghosts or men moved by springs" — and yes, this was the dawn of mechanics, these are the first automatons, ever since his exact contemporary Galileo founded physics based on the principle of inertia, that there's no magic or mysterious forces, but only extension and motion, right — one could very easily give me the illusion that there are men there, imitated — you find this again, no —
56:42 They call that — you know it better than I do from your TV series — there you go, I'll leave you with bionic men, right, can you imagine, at Descartes' time, imagining that one could make an automaton giving the illusion of a man; they even made one back then that was supposed to play chess. Imagine what one can do in the age of electronics, of the virtual, of screens, of high definition, of artificial intelligence. But still, these are machines, you see. So I go back to this extraordinary passage: 'If by chance I happen to look out a window at men passing in the street, at the sight of whom I do not fail to say that I see men, just as I say that I see wax, and yet what do I see from this window but hats and coats which could cover spectres or feigned men — feigned, to feign feigning, imitated, whatever — or feigned men who move only by springs? But I judge that they are real men. He is not mad. And so I understand, by the sole power of judgment which resides'
57:52 in my mind — here, in my mind — what I believed I saw with my eyes. I'll stop the dense part here; you'll find this text, I refer you to it, first of all because, well, it's like a soap opera, it's worth all the detective novels, isn't it — there's the Meditation, but at least try to have a bit of patience and read the first two, the first two: the first one, entitled 'Of the things that can be called into doubt,' that is, drawing up the inventory of everything that can be doubted. You'll see there isn't much that resists doubt. Then the turnaround, starting with the second Meditation: there we are, we have the first certainty, we finally touch the bottom of the water in which we were sinking, drowning in doubt, or we touch solid ground if we're coming down from the sky, whichever way you like — that is, the famous cogito, which Descartes will then use as a springboard to build something positive after this whole negative passage of doubt. So, don't worry.
59:03 My screen might go off for a few seconds because I don't yet know how — it's new — how do you say it in English — how you deactivate its tendency to try to save me energy I didn't ask for. But anyway I'll turn it back on right away, I'm telling you because I'm being warned it might go off in three minutes. So, I'm trying to make shorter formats than the previous times, this is an intermediate session, but I wanted to show you — I think everyone has now understood — the relationship between the state of so-called natural, ordinary language, to speak now like Clouscard, which I find much more appropriate, because when you look closely, there's nothing less natural than language, so much so that for theologians, most often, they've equated God himself with the logos, with language, so much does it seem not natural but precisely supernatural. Is this recording...
Language is not natural; Perceval before the snow 1:00:32 With the screen interruption — I don't think it interrupts the recording, because the sound kept being picked up — so I wanted to leave you with this text. I don't know, and we'll meet again to talk about the Quest for the Grail, and to end on a beautiful note — I allow myself to say 'on a beautiful note' not because of the beauty of what I'm going to say but because of the beauty of the passage I'm extracting, as a preview, from the immense Chrétien de Troyes' Quest for the Grail — an unfinished text, as it happens — which will bring me back to what I'll begin with. Perceval has just left his mother's castle; he's a young man in search of adventure, already a great knight with two or three exploits to his name, and his adversaries have learned to fear his strength. And there, it's winter, there's a vast white expanse, he comes out of the forest, he doesn't know
1:01:42 that King Arthur's court is right there, camping almost within sight, not far from where he is, but he sees nothing. Why? Well, to finish, here's this magnificent example of hesitation: he was out hunting, like a good little savage, and he wounded a merlin, a white bird, which fell; he rushed to pick it up but realized the bird was only wounded — it flew off again before he could reach it — and just as he was about to chase after it, he stops chasing it, because he sees that where the bird had stayed for a few seconds and from where it flew off again, three drops of blood remain on the snow. Next time I'll talk to you about this polarity, since to hesitate is to be on a cursor that is also between two antagonistic, contradictory, dialectical poles — the round one here will be red and white — but yes, it's going to be mysterious like this, you'll see it will be less so once we look at the texts
1:02:52 and the references next time — I'm telling you in advance, especially for those who'd like to read it beforehand, I can't recommend it enough — but I'll start with a sonnet by Mallarmé that has no title other than its first line, as one does when there is no title: 'The virgin, the vivacious, and the beautiful today' — oh, the Mariana of whiteness — 'the virgin, the vivacious, and the beautiful today' — and you'll see there's more than just that which is white in this poem. There, I'll leave Perceval — I'll finish on Perceval's case, who is fascinated by these three drops of blood on the snow to the point that he's absorbed and stays there for hours, and the court is annoyed to see this knight in the distance who doesn't come to greet the king, and some go to provoke him with weapons, with the lance, because he doesn't come to greet them, he's a boor — and he remains absorbed in the drops, and just in the last seconds, when he sees the knight about to charge at him, he makes a small gesture with his lance, the other man's collarbone breaks. Next one, and when he's got about four or five like that, the good knight Gawain, who at the time is the model knight, says to King Arthur: 'With your permission, I will go speak to him, for he may be'
1:04:03 someone who has — let's have a bit of silence — I leave you in the company of Perceval the Welshman, who inspired Wagner, as you know, his testament, which Nietzsche deplored as having abandoned the healthy violence of Germanic paganism found in Siegfried for the idiot who turns the other cheek when struck. There, I leave you with that, and since this isn't a live broadcast but a recording, as I've told you, we don't only have problems with the hall but also with technical management, maintenance issues. I'll take this opportunity to say that you're going to receive a letter reminding those who are behind on their membership dues, since we have some equipment costs — basic equipment, not very expensive, but still a minimum is needed — so if those who can, could hurry to settle their dues, that would be very welcome right now, but otherwise
1:05:14 do go ahead and note down your questions carefully, because the question-and-answer sessions are going to multiply and grow in importance. Thank you in advance, and in any case, thank you very much for your attention today. A huge thank you to Victor Serkis.
