English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Merleau-Ponty's triangle: myself, the true, and others 2:20 It's Merleau-Ponty who admirably saw this in "In Praise of Philosophy." He says, "Whatever way philosophers go about it, they are always at odds with the city and with others." He knows very well that without others, one cannot arrive at the truth. He said this very well. The triangle, here's a triangle. He speaks—and this answers your question well, Merleau-Ponty—of this triangle: "Me, the truth, and others." The philosopher relies on this triangle. It's no use being "Me with others without the truth." That's called opinion. I'm at the corner café, I'm with others, but without the truth.
2:51 It's the opposite of philosophy, and of science too. From a philosophical point of view, it's no use being "Me with the truth without others." I respect that—it's the fakir, the contemplative, the mystic, the stylite on his column. "Me with the truth without others." That's Zarathustra right at the beginning, the first half-line. When he was thirty years old, Zarathustra went up into the mountains and there addressed the sun in these terms: "Great star, what would your glory be if you had not those whom you illumine?" And Zarathustra came back down toward men, toward others.
3:21 So there you have it, this triangle is very well seen by Merleau-Ponty. "Me, the truth, and others"—philosophy is only valid if this triangle is always there, all three vertices together. It's no use sacrificing one to the other two. In that sense, I am left-wing insofar as I always have an unsettled relationship to politics. I cannot fit myself in—it's not a personal game, but as a philosopher, I cannot comfortably fit myself into one of the parts of the city. Because if the rules of justice exist, these parts have a relationship that is, in the last instance, conflictual.
A colonial child and the discovery of the class relation 3:56 And secondly, I place myself on the left somewhat against my own inclination—it's not at all my original sensibility. But well, to start with, I was a little colonial child. Around me, there were people who collaborated with the Japanese when I was born in Vietnam, the French people over there, the majority of them. Just as here, people collaborated with the Germans. I was raised in a colonialist milieu. They used to say that it's we who spoiled these negroes by bringing them the radio. They didn't need it, we created needs for them.
4:26 It's interesting, I think it's something similar to what I used to hear in the worst colonial circles when I was a kid. It was that we spoiled them by bringing them consumption. Curious, this comparison. So, that's what I was raised in. Well, as Novalis says—a contemporary of Hegel—the philosophical act par excellence is the murder of oneself. To be a philosopher is first to live through a crisis. Because everyone has personal paths that led them to where they are. They have nothing to blush about nor to congratulate themselves for, since they are often not responsible for those paths. I was in the colonial empire because I was in my parents' suitcases.
4:57 But on the other hand, one cannot forgive the individual for failing to take stock and step back at some point from his determinations. And to go very quickly, one can't dwell forever on the question—when I heard my mother, for instance, who like me was born in Hanoi, who lived in the colonial world, and when I heard my mother, on holiday in Nice, tell me about the plumber who was doing a repair in the living room, "Go see whether he's not stealing something," I saw, from the tone of her voice, from her expression, exactly how she used to talk about the African houseboys.
5:27 I don't hold it against my mother. And immediately, the class relation appeared to me, all at once, luminously. And yet, he's not black, the plumber. So it's all nonsense, this business of blacks and whites. She's wary of him the way she was wary of the "savage" over there. Because after all, he's poor, he has the same... he doesn't have the same code of social manners, and he wouldn't know, when my mother gives receptions, whether to serve from the left or the right. So, go see whether he's not stealing something. And she was the best of women, it was a perfectly normal reflex, the upbringing she had received.
Humanism against naturalist ecologism 5:59 So that sums up well in what sense I am on the left. Again, it's not my sensibility, it's not my opinions. My inclination would rather be... to be somewhat nocturnal, solitary. And there you go. No, it's the opposite. And fortunately so, because it allowed me to see things, especially through my work as a teacher, and particularly through having had the chance to teach south of the Sahara, in what are called developing countries, or even in LDCs—forgive the administrative acronyms—the least developed countries, I'm thinking of Niger or Mali, economically speaking.
6:33 It allowed me to see everything that my own path—including as an intellectual, as a music lover—owed to millennia of human history, which we erase with a stroke of the pen, ever since this dominant ideology invaded the West, and in my view environmentalism too—again, I am a defender of the environment, but I don't confuse it with nature, I'll get to that. Naturalist environmentalism, which is the dominant discourse one hears about the environment, where the supreme value is nature, no longer man.
7:04 It's really a counter-revolution—after all, it was man who was the meaning of progress, etc. And now it's nature. As a man of the left, I remain a humanist. I know very well this runs counter to Deleuze, to Althusser—I come across as a bit old-fashioned when I say humanist, that man is a value. What does Foucault say? That it's a recent invention, and one that, fortunately, we're soon ready to be rid of. All right? Well. And granted that humanism speaks historically—that's not false, it's the notion, the syntagma, of humanism itself.
7:34 But still, it's monstrous, in a way, from a strictly political point of view, and it's false in the historical sense, very quickly put. And let the ecologists listen carefully to what I'm about to say. When I say ecologists, I'm not talking about those who are concerned about the environment, but about those who prescribe the discourse one must hold about the environment. Namely, the oldest source of energy in our regions, charcoal—if we had kept going with charcoal, there wouldn't be a single tree left on the planet. If today's production levels needed to be fueled with trees, there wouldn't be a single tree left. Fortunately, there were no ecologists back then, but we did move from charcoal to coal proper.
8:09 That's an ecological progress. I'm not talking about the other kinds of progress it brought about. Fortunately we gave up coal, which is nonetheless dirty, one of the most carbon-heavy. As for oil, which is also a product of organic decomposition, so it also emits CO2, but well, seven times less than coal, for an equal quantity. That's progress. I need seven times less oil than I need coal for the same energy output. There you go. And now I'm going to make everyone scream—as for nuclear power, outright, with a small quantity of uranium like this, I can power three cities the size of Lyon.
8:43 I mean, and there, I no longer destroy trees, and I don't send CO2 into the atmosphere. Yes, but the waste. And fortunately there's ITER, in the south of France, working on controlled fusion, which is the most important thing, in scientific and technical terms, for the generations to come, where we'll be able to do clean nuclear power, with no radioactivity left at all. So I don't see where the problem is. I mean that technological progress has always been—not the intention, the intentions were selfish ones, of ironmasters and the like. But objectively, men are not idiots.
9:14 I mean, progress would have consisted in using less and less matter for more and more energy. There you go, there you go. So, once again, I place myself on the left in that sense, somewhat—I won't say alone, because there are more and more people who see the excesses of a certain environmentalist discourse. I'm not one of those who lie down under cars breathing in the exhaust fumes with delight. I'm not a masochist. Who wants a poor environment at home, in their garden, in their living room, in their city?
9:44 No one! So the cause is already unanimous, which is a bit strange. So that's not the question. The problem is knowing whether a good environment means letting nature take its course, or whether nature must always be organized for the benefit of values that hold for man. And for man alone—that's what I stand for. It's in this sense that I am a humanist.
