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Humor, the Greek temple, and the Gothic cathedral 0:00 All the same, you have a bit of a joker's mind. That's exactly what I'm going to try to justify, to show that it's not merely a personal quirk, but that it corresponds to an objective demand of thought and of culture, according to Hegel at any rate.
0:44 Be that as it may, with him, in any case, all aesthetic cycles—you know, he wrote an aesthetics in four volumes, which is the first great aesthetics in the history of philosophy posited as such. Plato's Phaedrus was missing that admirable aesthetics, which does not know itself as such because the discipline did not yet have its autonomy, of course. Hegel himself said that the first aesthetics worthy of a philosopher was Kant's Critique of Judgment, Kant's masterpiece, the last critique, as they say, just before himself. Moreover, when a student came to tell him, 'Sir, I'm lost, I no longer understand anything in your labyrinth.'
1:17 I'm telling you this because it can be useful—we're all more or less lost from time to time. If it can reassure you, we've all been through that and we go through it again. He would tell him: start with the Critique of Judgment. You see, that's the advice he gave, if you want a good way to start in philosophy. For someone who wrote a great deal against Kant, what a tribute nonetheless—to start with the Critique of Judgment. So there. That's why I'm making this little preliminary remark, because we talked quite a bit about Kant today.
1:47 Hegel, who doesn't strike one as a joker, nevertheless created an aesthetics in which there is always a great deal of prize-giving. Even if authors defend themselves against it, even if they say they try to be objective, etc. There are always musical works he praises and others he blames, or paintings, or texts, etc. In short. And Hegel shows in his aesthetics that all aesthetic cycles end in humor.
2:19 Whether it be the Greek world—the Greek world culminates in dramatic art, I think we sketched that a bit last time, and we'll actually understand this today. Dramatic art contains all the arts at once: the plastic arts, dance, speech, text, presentation, scansion, hence music, rhythm. Moreover, dramatic art was simply called 'music' among the Greeks. Wagner made great use of this to justify his conception of the total work of art.
2:51 Every time one thinks of the total work of art, everyone of course claims kinship with the Greeks. That is to say, today it would be cinema, if you like, which brings together the plastic arts, music, content, and darkness besides. We'll see that this is not entirely a coincidence. Rather than putting it off, in fact—the fact that it's not a coincidence—I'll illustrate it right away, because it's a quick detour, in this very aesthetics I recommend to you, it's a superb book, though it may seem a bit long at times, and he talks about the cathedral, the Christian Gothic cathedral, he talks about the Romanesque church, the Gothic cathedral, and he makes a comparison with the Greek temple, the north portal.
3:36 There's a whole set of symmetries, of symmetrical oppositions, at the same time, where he shows, for example, that the relation of the vertical and the horizontal is reversed—in one case and the other, the Greek temple tempers, moderates the verticality of the columns through the lintel, the tympanum, through measure. That's the Greeks' concern not to sink into hubris, you know, which was the worst of faults for them—'hybrid,' monstrous, comes from that, hubris, that is, excess, that's the best word-for-word translation, when one crosses the limit.
4:14 When Phèdre, in Racine, says, 'Gods! Would that I were seated in the forest's shade, following with my eye a chariot fleeing down the track,' she is in hubris, because a queen must remain at court, in the light, at the hearth, and not dream of being in the forest chasing boars near Hippolytus. And when Hippolytus, from the very first verse, the first verse, says, 'The decision is made, I am leaving, dear Theramenes,' he's done for. Because you know as well as I do that classical tragedy presupposes unity of place. So he cannot leave. You know as well as I do that he will die before the end of the play.
4:46 But from the outset, he is in danger. Because Racine alludes to the sails swelling in the harbor, ready to receive you, our ships await you at the foot of the altar, you may board them under the rule of the seas which must carry you. So we are constantly on the verge of transgressing the unity of place, you see, on the verge of hubris. And in the case at hand, hubris, that is, going upward, going toward the divine, is exactly the opposite of Christianity.
5:19 This is important for understanding what follows—I told you last time, we said about this, that among all the oppositions running through Hegel, if we don't want to get lost as in a labyrinth, precisely, there was a good landmark, it was the short text by Hyppolite that I read you from the back cover of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right—Hyppolite, the very one who translated the Phenomenology of Spirit into French before the war—where he said, one cannot agree with the solutions Hegel proposes, but one must recognize that the problems he posed are, par excellence, our own problems of modernity, that is, the opposition between the Greek world, the city, in which the political—that which is here below—is the goal of my world.
5:55 The worst thing for a Greek is to be excluded from the city, to be banished. That is to say, one condemns the one who has committed the most monstrous crime, Oedipus. He is not cut into pieces. We know that he is Greek and that what he will suffer most is being outside the city. There is nothing more anti-ecological than this city, is there? I want to say—I have nothing against, once again, against my environment, but I mean against ecological naturalism—since among the Greeks one escapes nature into the city, which is the exact opposite of the modern world, isn't it?
6:26 And so, on one side there is this Greek world, and then the Christian world, which aim instead at a beyond, where being becomes essence, to speak in Hegelian terms, I would say a being that is beyond being. And so, in this comparison, he says at one point that the light in the Parthenon—the essential thing in the Greek temple in general, and moreover in Greek aesthetics in general—the essential thing is what one sees from the outside. One does not get the revelation of the Parthenon's beauty by entering it.
6:58 What was inside? Not much. An altar where a goat was sacrificed and a few vestal virgins. But, he says, in the cathedral, the essential thing is inside. Even though the outside is splendid, the essential is interior—the stained-glass windows, the sacred heart, the tabernacle, everything is inside. It's the world of interiority, you see? It's a beautiful opposition, where the light of Apollo, that of the Greek world, is filtered through the stained glass—there's a very fine analysis—so that it is the light of the soul that radiates within the cathedral. And if one doesn't grasp this opposition visually, even though it's fairly simple, one need only listen to sacred music, Bach's in particular, in particular the Christian view of the soul, to see how right he is on that score.
7:39 So this opposition, which seemed fundamental to me, we treated it in rather general terms, and last time we left off with the commitment that today we would get into the heart of the matter by trying to follow the text a bit more closely. And in particular the text of the Introduction. As I pointed out last time, the Phenomenology is preceded by two very important texts. The Preface, of course, the famous preface, which I remind you exists in a separate edition, for those who might want to take it along on its own without the whole volume.
An anti-introduction: no method separate from content 8:21 And this preface is followed by an introduction. Now, this isn't redundant—it's not preface 1, preface 2. The preface, I remind you, says right from the start, is a preface, an anti-preface if you prefer, since Hegel spends his time saying: here's what a preface should not be used for, in general and especially not in philosophy. Namely, to sum up the essential in one sentence, etc. As if in one sentence one would get the abstraction of the sentence, and it would itself be a betrayal of the true, which for him is always concrete, isn't it?
9:05 So that's it. And after showing that the preface is an anti-preface, we're going to see an introduction, an anti-introduction—it's not to annoy us that he does this—namely, an introduction where one might say, well, perhaps it's time to talk about the method I'm going to follow, says Hegel. Now, what is typically Hegelian is precisely to show that it is pointless to separate method from content. And wanting to isolate a methodology—this is very current in the human sciences, what I'm saying, we've been debating it for 50 years, it's a very current problem—wanting to isolate a methodology from its content instead of doing it, that's rather his approach, yes, I didn't say method, letting it emerge in the treatment of the content itself—it's a bit like what a baby does, you see. Working out method independently of content is a bit like the famous caricature of someone who wants to learn to swim without going into the water, isn't it?
10:06 Well, you know, babies—it's well known—and truly, as soon as they're thrown into the water, instinctively, it's within the appearance of the content, here, the danger represented by drowning, that they immediately have excellent instincts to block their nostrils, to... There you go. The commercials say much more about that, they say... Yes, but I don't know. Even if it exaggerates a little. There you go. For the sake of argument. So, today it's the introduction, and in the introduction, which shouldn't have existed, since Hegel says in the preface that there is no introduction to knowledge, one must go straight, bang, into what he calls...
10:40 directly, what he calls the thing itself, die Sache selbst. I say it in German, not to show off—every time I make a remark in German, I'm not from the Heideggerian school, I don't muddy the waters to make them seem deep—it's simply because... I'm warning against a terminology concerning the word 'thing.' When he says 'the thing itself' with Sache, it's the equivalent of the Latin causa, that which is at issue. The object, so to speak, of our reflection, you see, not thing in the sense of this, that...
11:12 That, in German, is said DING, which gives 'thing' in English, of course. Res. There you go, res, exactly. Res versus causa. We're in agreement, exactly. So, the thing itself is rather causa, rather than res, which gives 'reality,' 'to reify,' 'reification,' etc. In this introduction, then, why did he do it anyway? There's an unease there, in Hegel, a slight unease. An apparent little contradiction. Well, this contradiction stems precisely from his own ambivalent relationship within the work. That's why I'm taking the liberty of bringing it out here for you, so that it's quite clear.
11:47 His ambivalence toward the understanding. We've already talked about the understanding, especially in the second session, and even more today, you'll see, because for those who are a bit initiated and have reflexes in Hegelian studies, the understanding makes one think of Kant and Fichte, of course. Intuition is romantic, it's Schelling, etc. Later, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc.—aesthetic intuition. Whereas the understanding, reflection, the concept, dried-up rationalism, so to speak, etc.—that's Kant and Fichte. And we know that Hegel spent his life detailing the synthesis of these two approaches.
12:21 So why am I talking about the understanding again? Because, you see, let's start right away with the beginning of the Introduction, rather than introducing it. You immediately have this. 'It is natural to suppose that before philosophy takes up the thing itself'—there it is, saying—'that is, the actual cognition of what truly is'—for those following along, we're free, you don't have to follow, we're on vacation.
12:51 In any case, I'll repeat myself, for those who haven't followed everything. I speak fast, but speed makes up for the delivery. 'The actual cognition'—that's the somewhat labored translation in dear Hyppolite for rendering Wirklichkeit, that word by which one translates 'reality' in Hegel, but I pointed out to you that when he says 'real,' one has to look carefully at the German text, because sometimes it's Realität, that's the Latin, Romance root, that's reality in the ordinary sense, what in philosophy we call the sensible, what we touch, what we see, and that's far—think of science.
13:31 It's been five centuries now that the hard sciences have been showing us that we are quite far from reality by simply opening our eyes, and it's certainly not with our snouts, is it, that the real is going to come into our brains, and especially not fifth-degree equations. And so, when it's actual reality, as he says, that is, the one obtained by the detour of abstraction, by distrusting the sensible, and by being rigorous in one's statements—there he uses the word Wirklichkeit, which comes from wirken, meaning to work, to labor, and which you find in the English 'work'—that's a reminder from last time, quite simply.
14:14 So he says actual reality—Hyppolite tries indeed to render this effective side, doesn't he, of true reality. To sum up the essential of what I've just said about the two senses of 'reality,' let's say that between Realität and Wirklichkeit, the whole path, the whole itinerary of knowledge consists in starting from a reality that gives itself immediately, and which is the reality that is the most false, the most abstract—as we'll soon see—and moving toward actual reality, which is the richest and most concrete, but 'concrete' here doesn't mean that one touches and sees it, for that is still very abstract.
Knowledge as instrument or as medium 14:53 I think one believes there is fullness where in fact there is thought, whereas there is much more emptiness than fullness—all the atomists know that. So: 'It is natural to suppose that before philosophy takes up the thing itself, that is, the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument by means of which one takes hold of the absolute, or as the medium through which one glimpses it.' The instrument. There's the method. So he says this, and he well knows that he'll soon say the opposite.
15:26 But he takes note of the fact that the question is posed this way: what is your method? And the method is the instrument. That's an old tradition. Instrument, tool, organ. I remind you that the first logic or methodology to appear in the history of philosophy is Aristotle's famous logic. Aristotle told his students, you're newcomers, you're beginners, you have to start with logic. After that, we'll do physics, and then for those who are strong, we'll do what comes after physics, that is, meta-physics.
15:59 Aristotle's system, which is very coherent. And logic, for beginners—the Categories, the Prior Analytics—we're not here to lay out the whole of Aristotle's logic, but one had to start there. What is the Greek word in this Aristotelian system for logic? Organon. So, don't worry, all of this belongs to the same order. An organ, a tool, a tool, sorry, a method, is the means. It's normal—you enter a workshop class in a vocational school, I don't know if it's still called that, a technical college, and before making objects, you learn to use the tools with which you make those objects.
16:38 You know, they first learn to file with a file, it's a whole world. So it seems we should do the same in philosophy, and start by studying the instrument that will serve us to grasp the content. 'Such a concern seems partly justified, because there could be various kinds of cognition, and among them one might be better suited than another for attaining this final goal.' You don't drive a nail with a screwdriver. Justified, then, one may—but it's not the right approach.
17:08 'In the end, this concern must turn into the conviction that the whole undertaking of gaining, through the mediation of cognition, access to consciousness of what is in itself, is in its very concept nonsensical, and that there is a very clear boundary line between cognition and truth. For if cognition is the instrument for laying hold of the essence, it immediately occurs to one that the application of an instrument to a thing does not leave it as it is.' Hegel raises a problem here.
17:38 If one has the conception of cognition through the metaphor of the instrument, or of the medium—it comes to the same thing, I'll give you some details on the medium afterward, but it amounts to the same—as a means, we find the medium again, milieu, we're already outside the true, Hegel would say, because it's quite obvious that a tool leaves its trace on the object. It's as if, with a spotlight, I illuminated objects in the darkness, and by lighting them with 2000, 3000, 6000 watts and more, to see how they are when I'm not there to see them—how they are in themselves—it's contradictory: the more I illuminate them, the less I see them as they were before I illuminated them. I would even say that this contradiction isn't just philosophical chatter, but has been elevated to the rank of law by contemporary physics, in the famous Heisenberg uncertainty relations, the German physicist whose Nazism I denounced the other day, but who is no less a very great physicist, who belonged to Niels Bohr's school, quite simply in physics—that's a fine recommendation—Niels Bohr, the Dane, of the Copenhagen school; that is, roughly, the conception we have today of the atom, of quantum mechanics in general, which emerged
18:48 from that period—it's the two great contributions of contemporary physics, great fundamental revolutions that took place at the beginning of the 20th century; there haven't been any since, which we'll come back to, a bit worrying given the number of revolutions that had come before, which seemed to be accelerating, and then it stagnates at the start of the 20th century—I'm speaking of fundamental physics, of course; technology gives you novelties every day—it's Einstein's relativity, of course, and quantum mechanics. Now what the uncertainty relations show—not merely show but demonstrate—the Heisenberg uncertainty relations, is that one cannot know at the same time the position of a particle and its velocity—verified every day in particle accelerators. I'm making this detour a bit because I don't know if some of you have followed, but there has just been a very major event in the silent universe of fundamental research, so much so that even Le Monde devoted a front-page article to it—if Le Monde talks about serious things or not, it's the discovery, so to speak, of what we may finally have found: the Higgs boson. Didn't you see that in the news?
19:53 Did you see it? Yes. We're not straying off topic—this would eliminate, roughly speaking, the whole of contemporary physics, with its mathematical modeling, like everything serious in science since Galileo—we'll come back to that—but as for epistemological considerations, today's mathematical modeling only works if the Higgs boson exists—but its existence had never been empirically confirmed until now. So it seems that a few weeks ago it was measured for a few millionths of a second, so it's starting to gain some access to existence—I'm not a physicist, I won't decide, because apparently there's still a billionth of a decimal missing or something to be sure it really exists. This is to tell you that one cannot know at the same time the velocity and the position of a particle. Now, in all of classical mechanics, and still now with GPS to locate the president's car for security services, when you have position and velocity, you can locate a moving object wherever it is, in the plane, in space, isn't that so? And here we cannot—why?
20:54 to locate its position, I must illuminate it, and when I illuminate it, I bombard it with light particles, with photons, and thereby I change its velocity. So it's not that its velocity is so complex to determine that all our science can't quite get there, only approach it—that's not it, that would be an illusion. It's our very attitude of wanting to know it that changes its velocity, which is much more serious: the subject here directly intervenes in the nature of the object. That is exactly what Hegel says: an instrument is not without effect on the object on which it is used. So what is he alluding to?
The mirror-mind and Aristotle's empiricism 21:37 He's alluding to Kant. There we go, now we're getting into it—the great Kantian contribution to philosophy, which Hegel claims for himself and spends his time saying he's extending—I'll tell you afterward about the excerpts from the correspondence between the three friends and Hölderlin, to see how much Kant was the absolute reference for them—what Kant showed is that the old conception of subject-object relations in all philosophy up to him, up to what he calls, with all modesty, the Copernican revolution—what is it, roughly speaking, that began with the appearance of what we would today call the hard sciences, modern science—the world used to represent the subject, well, the self, the self of thought, of course, I'm not talking here about the psychological or novelistic self, but the abstract self, the self that is the same in each and every one of us—when Descartes says cogito, it's no longer a matter of René Descartes, gentleman of Poitou, we don't care about that; he's describing an experience that any one of us can arrive at; we'll read Descartes shortly and you'll see that he's very democratic in that sense, I mean, we can follow him at every moment and internalize that self.
22:48 It's a personal self—so the self of the philosopher is seen through the image of the mirror, you see. When Aristotle, who is the father of empiricism—that is, roughly, Saint Thomas is the empiricist, 'I only believe what I touch,' everything I see—I'm caricaturing here and simplifying enormously one of the most complex, most profound thinkers of all time, Aristotle—but roughly speaking, you all know this painting by Raphael, there's a reproduction of it in the hall of the Sainte-Geneviève library, isn't there, which represents the Academy, that is, Plato's school, where Aristotle stayed for 30 years—he's not forgotten, you know Plato well—so where we see Plato and Aristotle descending the stairs of the Academy—it's a very neo-antique, Renaissance-style vision, like that—and we see Plato like this, with his index finger pointing upward, toward the world of ideas, toward the empyrean, of course, toward what Mallarmé will later call the 'anterior sky where beauty blossoms,' and Aristotle, calm, like this: let's stay on the ground, on the pastureland, etc.
23:45 Aristotle, and then Plato, was more drawn toward mathematics in the sciences; Aristotle toward biology, which is more experimental, more empirical, you see. And since he had been Alexander's tutor—an odd pair, the greatest philosopher of his time and the greatest military leader of his time, an odd pair—when Alexander set off on his expeditions to the East, Aristotle sent along people of his own to bring back samples from those unknown regions. Yes indeed, animals, and even now—there's something a bit fanciful about it, of course; on the other hand, there are studies that still carry authority on the dogfish shark, if I remember rightly, and on the movement of plankton—still, he was quite an observer, there you go. Whereas Plato, you'll say, toward the mathematical abstractions of the world of ideas—'let no one enter here who is not a geometer,' he had written at the entrance to his house, it's a vision one often finds. So Kant says, but this conception, this Aristotelian conception, which amounts to saying, in a formula that would be repeated throughout the Middle Ages by scholasticism, nihil est in intellectu quod prius fuerit in sensu—there is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses—we should note this phrase carefully, because if anyone ever talks to you about empiricism, about realism,
24:55 in the ordinary sense, I mean, this phrase serves as the foundation—no need to look elsewhere or to support it further; if you draw out everything this phrase says, you get all the empiricist theories in order. Let me explain: there is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses—that means there can be nothing in a mirror, in a looking glass, if there isn't first something in front of the mirror before the object is in the mirror; it must first be in front of it—there's a priority of exteriority. And thus, comparing the subject, the thinking self, to a mirror is somewhat to make it into something passive. One could even turn it into an inequation—you'll say I really like doing that, but it's not me, I'm only trying to comment on the quotations I'm dealing with, if you like—there is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses means there cannot be more in the mirror than what is in front of it; at best, there can be, if it's an excellent mirror without distortion, without all that, you know, those mirrors that require enormous technological elaboration, used for telescopes—imagine if there's the slightest flaw, the slightest, the tiniest crack in the lens, lenses that are transported by means
26:05 that cost a fortune, into the mountains, in the Peruvian desert, that measure 10 meters in diameter—if there's the slightest flaw, the slightest excess curve, a thousandth of a millimeter, let alone a millionth—it doesn't seem like much, but when afterward one studies distances or magnitudes of stars that are billions of kilometers away, the difference makes a great deal. So, at best, assuming a perfect mirror—which doesn't exist—at best there is in the mirror at least as much as what is in front of it, but certainly not more. There is no creation, no spontaneity of mind and thought, thought being so thoroughly steered by what is in front of it. Kant, reacting against this, showed that if we live in a scientific world—the scientific revolution having occurred, with the speed we know, from the 16th century up to, up to our own day, in Kant's time up to, let's say, d'Alembert, the Enlightenment thinkers, Newton's immediate successors—I'll sum up very quickly the Kantian epistemology, which is roughly the epistemology of most of those who reflect on this today, so it's worth knowing—it's the famous text
The Copernican revolution and the order of appearance of the sciences 27:17 of the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant says, taking up the Copernican revolution in the strict sense this time—the one that took place in astronomy, and which we miss the point of if we settle for remembering only that the earth moves or that it revolves around the sun, because it's a revolution all along the line, not only on those points—an inversion took place, and when he says what Copernicus, Galileo, Torricelli, Stahl did—he's the one who names them, Stahl being a German chemist of the time—he says: instead of observing, of looking—I alluded to the ziggurats last time, you recall, those sorts of little pyramids the Chaldean magi, the Chaldean astrologers, would climb up in order to see the stars more closely, as if climbing a few dozen meters was going to change anything—it's no longer a matter of seeing, of climbing, but of thinking. It seems strange nonetheless: if I want to know the world, the universe, don't I have to look? No—one must make equations. That's how it happened in the history
28:28 of physics: it's when we stopped looking at objects and began putting our thoughts in order that mathematics was the first to do so. I'll take the opportunity to make a small detour here since we're deep in epistemology—we've been serious today, we've tried to be rigorous—if you go back, I'm only using here references for which the scientific knowledge of any ordinary person is quite sufficient—if you take the history of the sciences in order of appearance, we have a succession, everyone knows this, an order of succession that begins, of course, with mathematics, the first scientific discipline to have constituted itself in an autonomous way, roughly 2400 years ago—so we'll say the discipline, mathematics, a proper name, Euclid, even though we suspect it was teamwork and his name simply floated to the surface—not that mathematics wasn't being done before Euclid; there's a very complex duodecimal system among the Babylonians, among the Egyptians there was geometry
29:38 But that wasn't mathematics, that is to say, it was immediately applied to an external technological aim, which the mathematician couldn't care less about. For example, it's no accident that in mathematics we use a word like geometry — word for word it means not the science of the earth, that's geology, but the measure of the earth, geo-metry. And indeed it's a very ancient allusion to the fact that when the Nile, after its floods, returned to its bed, everyone's property and fields had to be restored to them without too much frustration, without anyone being too wronged — you had to measure properly. And since that's a bit tiring, imagine, in the heat of Egypt, measuring — people realized that by measuring one side of a square field, that was enough, you didn't need to measure the other three, you just multiplied by four. At the start, geometry was that. That's fine, there would never have been theoretical geometry without it. But starting with Euclid, the revolution is that the mathematician's goal is to produce true, demonstrated propositions, and not to apply them to something else. That's the split between fundamental research and applied research, quite simply. So mathematics, the first sciences.
30:48 about 2500 years ago, around the name of Euclid. After that you have to wait a long time, 20 centuries — what is the next science after that, which discipline became scientific after mathematics, in your opinion? Astronomy was part of mathematics — that's a good question, no, of course, that's an applied science, that's not what I just said. But indeed it's physics, that's right, in a very broad sense that includes astronomy — the moment I apply mathematical discourse to an external reality, be it physical, chemical, all that, those are the sub-continents of the physics revolution, of course. So mathematics 2500 years ago, physics 20 centuries later with Galileo, the movement that took place in Italy — the word engineer comes from ingenium, those who work with ingenium, understanding, between the 15th and 16th centuries. Then you have to wait for Lavoisier — and this time we'll wait much less long — in the 18th century, who founded chemistry. He's the first to synthesize air.
31:59 first, then water. You know, with Lavoisier we stop doing alchemy, stop speaking in qualitative terms, and instead we measure. There is science only of the measurable, says Bachelard, the greatest French epistemologist of the pre-war period along with Canguilhem and Koyré — there is science only of the measurable, not of the measured; there are still plenty of things, but at least of what lends itself to measurement. So mathematics 2500 years ago, physics 20 centuries later with Galileo etc., chemistry with Lavoisier — yes, we're getting organized — biology, Claude Bernard, how long do we have to wait, 80 years, that's the middle of the 19th century. Done for the natural sciences — all the others fall within one of the three disciplines I've just listed for the hard sciences: mathematics, physics, chemistry. Of course, soil mechanics, fluid physics, all that is part of physics, of course. Today's biology, of course, doesn't see life as some little mysterious irrational thing, it's mechanical, it's physico-chemistry.
33:10 applied to living beings. In fact, Claude Bernard used to say the living thing is the dead thing. And if Claude Bernard carried out a biological revolution — I take all these examples not to wander off but on the contrary to illustrate the question we asked ourselves: what happened for science suddenly to take off and keep accelerating, what is the principle at work that Kant calls the Copernican revolution — that's the thread. Well, he proceeded by measurement. The first discovery he made is the famous glycogenic function of the liver, which simply means he discovered that the liver was a factory for producing sugar. Filling in words comes to fill the void of the thing — you know, to make it sound like knowledge we use foreign words, Molière mocked that very well, Latin or even Greek — no, this is German, and glycogenic means it produces sugar, it's not complicated. And a psychosomatic illness means an illness that works on the soul as much as the body — we haven't made much progress, but put that way it's a bit more prosaic, though it means exactly the same thing. If you want to sound learned you say, 'I think I have something psychosomatic,' well that means 'I'm fed up with it' — yes, that's an expression, I say that because my back hurts a bit today. That's roughly it.
Reason as judge: from Newton to Einstein 34:21 And he measured the quantity of sugar there was before the food bolus passed through the liver, he measured the quantity there was after — there was more after than before. We're far from an approach to the living being all the same — the organic isn't like the chemical, there's a sacred unity of part and whole, no, there's no metaphysics here, he applied to the living what had worked so well before, something not yet formulated in the so-called hard sciences. Now, what Kant shows is — I'll quote for you the sentence that sums up this magnificent development in the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, his major work as far as knowledge is concerned, not morality — that's the Critique of Practical Reason — nor art or beauty, that's the Critique of Judgment. But to come back to pure reason, after giving all these examples, Galileo, Torricelli, Galileo, Torricelli, Stahl, etc., he says: it was a flash of light for all physicists. All at once there's the word 'revelation,' it's not something continuous, there's the moment. He understood that reason sees only what it itself produces — there we've left behind the mirror mind.
35:32 You remember I said the passive mind, where knowing would mean letting things outside come to me without distorting them — no, the mind sees only what it produces, reason sees only what it itself produces. I'll continue, but let me pause here for a moment. That means our mirror-subject — let's look at the optical metaphor — has become a prism-subject, where light arrives on one side of the prism and, when it comes out, the white light has become colored light. Something has happened, it's no longer a passive medium — our reason, human thought, is a little factory where reality, when it enters, transforms itself and can come out as actual knowledge. So I continue the quotation: now they understood, all these scholars, that reason sees only what it itself produces and that it must appear before nature — there's experience, I haven't said anything against experience, when I said we must be wary of the sensible, I didn't say we shouldn't experiment. But that's where we'll see, I say to Bachelard, this text of Kant's shows that scientific experimentation has nothing to do with, and even runs counter to, ordinary experience.
36:42 the kind we all engage in when you say all English people are redheads — I once landed in Calais, I saw a redhead, I concluded all English people are redheads, I'm caricaturing a bit — that's not the empiricism of science. They understood that reason sees only what it itself produces and that it must appear before nature not like a pupil who lets the teacher say whatever he pleases — my mind registers, 'oh it's windy, it's windy, it's green, it's green' — I thought I was joking — but like a judge in session who forces witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. It's an admirable sentence because it sums up, it sums up well, the modern scientific attitude, without which the world we live in couldn't even have appeared. I repeat: it was a flash of light for all physicists, they understood that reason sees only what it itself produces and that it must therefore appear before nature not like a pupil who lets the teacher say whatever he pleases, but like a judge in session who forces witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. In other words, the difference between scientific experimentation, the moment when reason—
37:52 arrives before nature — I mentioned the telescope earlier, or the microscope, it comes to the same thing — at that moment the scientist doesn't arrive in a virgin, passive way, he arrives with a file, he has questions to ask, he sets out to denounce — let me give you a very concrete example on this point, regarding the formulation of the theory of relativity. What reigned until the theory of relativity, until Einstein's initiative? It was Newtonian physics, also called classical physics. Now don't think for a moment that we're in the world of opinion, of café chatter, where one view wins out over another only to be crushed afterward by a third, etc.
38:36 or opinions, as Kant says, are like wrestlers in an arena where no one ever gets the upper hand. In science, it accumulates — Newton did not become false with the theory of relativity, every physicist in the world uses Newtonian mechanics every day. It's simply that what happens here — and this is profound — is what always happens in the history of science: the progress, the step forward that Einstein takes relative to Newton, isn't 'I take Newton and throw him in the trash and now I have the theory of relativity,' no — it's that Newton is right, but I limit the field in which he is right. He's not right across the board. When you get to objects — to simplify — that move very close to the speed of light, you can no longer use Newton, and so in microphysics, where there are particles often very close to the speed of light, Newton's law, which is used every day for planes and things far from the speed of light and which is mobile and surrounds us most of the time — that was a reminder. Newton remains valid, but what's superseded in Newton is his claim to be universal. Now what did—
39:46 Newton consider universal — not that bodies attract each other etc., that's a great finding of his, still valid today, not at all invalidated — it's his notion of ether. So what is this thing, ether, moreover a notion that today seems almost mysterious and unscientific? Well, it's precisely this notion of ether that collapsed in a famous experiment I'm going to talk about, the so-called Michelson experiment, which put Einstein on the trail. Let me explain: for a body to move, for there to be motion, there must be a fixed point relative to which this motion exists. You've all had the experience on a train of wondering whether it was you leaving or the train next to you — it seems like nothing, but well before Einstein, Galileo was the first to formulate what I've just stated, which is the theory of relativity, not of time but of motion. Ever since Galileo, the scientific world has been fully aware that motion is a relative thing — meaning there's no motion if there's no fixed point. And if I — imagine we go to Holland, I say Holland because it's a flat country, so for optical illusions it's convenient — imagine that—
40:56 there's a barge — there are barges everywhere in Holland, there are canals running through the countryside, very pretty — and imagine the bargeman walks from the bow of his barge toward the stern, from front to back if you prefer, at exactly the speed the barge is moving but in the opposite direction. I, standing in the field, will see him as motionless. It's not contradictory to say that relative to the barge he's moving, but relative to the plane where I am, the field, he's motionless. So there's a relativity of motion, and what's even extraordinary — there are lots of things — is that we've known this since the 16th century, and most people haven't grasped it at all, and it ought to be taught — this will bring us back to Hegel. You can move and stay in the same place, yes, but precisely, it's not about local displacement, it's very important, since we're talking about Kant today, to recall that the relativity of motion as defined by Galileo shows — and in today's physics this remains valid since Galileo — that you can say of a body that it is in motion or at rest, that's not at all contradictory; what matters is whether it's inert or accelerating, that is, I state the principle of inertia.
42:06 it's Descartes who first stated it: a body subject to no force is either at rest or — you see, it's the same thing — moving in uniform rectilinear motion. That means, in a train where everything moves at the same speed, assuming there's no friction, no jolting, everything well-oiled, I'll say everything around me seems motionless because everything is moving at the same speed. And why do you say the tree isn't moving? Because it is moving, orbiting the sun along with the whole earth and us, at 30 km a second — it's because everything is moving at the same speed, quite simply. These are important reminders, because the reversal Kant brings about shows the power of the human mind. If there hadn't been this number of questions, these equations, this reasoning that lets the engineer come before nature, run experiments, and see if it matches, we wouldn't be where we are. I continue: the Michelson experiment. For there to be moving bodies, Newton had imagined — it's one of the rare things he didn't calculate but imagined, you see, that's precisely the fragile part — that there was somewhere in the universe something fixed, which he called the ether, which would be a kind—
43:16 of absolute immobility relative to which all motions could be calculated. Since this immobility was never proven experimentally, physicists of the 20th century, and in particular Michelson, an American, with his associate — I can't remember his name — some are geniuses of theory, Einstein, others are geniuses of experimentation — had built a little glass corridor 3 km long in Wisconsin, extraordinary, and to find out whether the ether existed or not, they ran an experiment consisting of sending a ray of light in the direction of the earth's motion and a ray of light in the opposite direction. If the ether existed, if Newton was right, in principle light should travel faster in the direction of the earth's motion — you've all learned the composition of velocities in physics: if I fire a rifle bullet from a car, the bullet will have the speed promised by whoever sold me the powder, plus the speed of the car, of course, velocities compose — and in the opposite direction you'd have to subtract the car's speed from the bullet's speed. So light should have traveled faster if the ether existed, in the direction of the earth's motion. The Michelson experiment—
44:26 with admirable precision, showed that light traveled at the same speed in every direction. That's — well, I won't dwell on it, I'll close my relativist parenthesis here. It should be recalled that one of the great achievements of relativity is that the speed of light is constant in every direction, and that it's a constant — there aren't many constants in the history — the more the history of science develops, the fewer constants there are, and this is one. Weight, for instance, is one of the properties of all objects — every object, even a billionth of a milligram, has weight, even an electron has weight, and the proof is that if I drop it, it falls. No — you've all read Tintin, we've walked on the moon — when Captain Haddock drops his whisky, it doesn't fall, it floats, right? This has been proven by everyone involved in the space adventure. Weight is not a constant, weight is not a substance — saying that objects... it's a relation, a relation to the gravitational pull exerted on it, and if this cup were far enough from the earth, about 80 or 90 km, it would float like Captain Haddock's whisky. Weight is not a constant. Mass, yes, mass, the quantity of matter it contains — ah yes, except it weighs here—
The phenomenon, the whole of appearance 45:36 200 g, and in space it will weigh how much? Bravo, zero, that's right, there's no weight, it floats. Gravity — mass is constant — well, no, with Einstein we'll learn that mass is relative to speed. You see, science tends rather toward the elimination of constants, of things that seem to us not to move. So for Einstein himself to say the speed of light is constant means we can neither accelerate nor slow it down — it's the only moving thing in the known universe of which we can say that. So Kant — and you understand why his young disciples are so deeply attached to his message — Kant, in short, is someone who takes stock of humanism, as it was called in the 16th century, a 16th-century humanism blocked at a certain point by the establishment of the state and of absolute monarchy in the 17th century, and which, from the death of Louis XIV onward, saw tongues loosen again — when the cat's away, the mice start dancing again. And so there's a very interesting parallel to draw between the 18th century, the century of the Enlightenment, and the 16th century, the Renaissance — both are centuries of upheaval, of questioning, of critique of what came before. In the 16th century—
46:46 at the Renaissance, critique of the whole medieval edifice — that covers a lot of centuries — and of course in the 18th century, critique of the feudal world, of the monarchical world, if you like, and the theological world as found in the writings of 18th-century authors. Kant, in a way, takes stock — it's a stocktaking and a sorting, a bit like Montaigne at the end of the 16th century: what do we keep of the great enthusiasms of the world, of Rabelais at the start of the Renaissance, what do we keep, what do we let go? Well, his great discovery is precisely that our mind, I come back to this, as Hegel said, is like a tool, an instrument, in which reality appears to us in a distorted way, and it's this distortion that he calls the phenomenon. And we wouldn't be working today on the Phenomenology of Spirit if Kant hadn't put in the foreground this notion, which was fairly rare before him in philosophy, almost non-existent even, the notion of phenomenon. So, a small terminological consideration: phenomenon, in German, is Erscheinung.
47:56 the root is Schein, which you find in the English 'to shine,' meaning to shine — you know how in French we say 'all that glitters is not gold' — we're not far from the phenomenon, Erscheinung. So don't make me say that phenomenon means appearance, because they're often confused — it's related, even the same root, but what's the difference between Erscheinung and Schein? Well, there's 'ung,' whose equivalent is the French '-tion' — action, contrition, nutrition, you see how every time there's the suffix '-tion,' it expresses an active attitude, that's the difference with '-ty.' When we argue for hours about whether man is free or determined — determined — and about whether freedom-as-a-state exists, we can make a fine synthesis with the concept of liberation, which sends both sides back to back while preserving what's excellent in each argument — that's the advantage over the two previous parts — because to say that there is no freedom other than one proceeding from a movement of liberation reminds us that if one is being liberated, one was previously determined. So both are there.
49:06 to be free is to come out of a determination in order precisely to free oneself from it, and it's in the act of freeing oneself that one is free, not as a definitive acquisition where I have freedom as a quality — you see, I'm coming back to static things. So Erscheinung should be translated into French as 'apparition,' except that in French that's tied to ghost stories, to specters, and might lead to misreadings. But ask a German off the street what Erscheinung means, outside any theoretical philosophical context, he'll tell you 'apparition,' he'll talk to you about dreams, ghosts, things like that. It's in this context that I say Erscheinung — it's interesting — the phenomenon is not appearance, says Kant, and here he gives a first distinction. Kant, I say it clearly, I specify because Hegel of course integrates it — it's not ahead of Kant — the difference is that the phenomenon is the whole of appearance, says Kant. It's the whole, it's not appearance, it's appearance taken as a whole, as totality. Now what makes experience a whole — you see, I won't go into detail here—
50:16 but I grasp this: if I took a photo, we'd see the totality of what I'm seeing right now, yes — but only if I turn around, it's a different totality, we just saw that. What makes appearance a whole is me, it's the subject, it's a whole because the real has no need whatsoever to be uni-totalized. I recall that in the Kantian categories, totality is the synthesis of unity and plurality — it's a bit dry when you read Kant's tables of categories, you learn them by heart like multiplication tables, it's two pages, not long. So you have categories for the thing — spatiality, temporality — and then there are quite simple categories at the level of number: three categories in Kant — singularity, plurality, and synthesis, totality. That means a totality is a plurality brought back to unity. We saw last time the difference between a heap of pebbles and a flower: in both cases we do have several things inside, in the heap of pebbles as in the flower, but instead of this plurality being assembled under the simple sign of plus—
51:26 as in the heap of pebbles, one pebble plus one pebble — in the case of organic totality, as we saw, the great difference is that the whole is immanent in each part. We illustrated this with dinosaur teeth, which allow one, from a single tooth, to reconstruct even the stomach it must have had, because of the plan — one can't in the long run escape the immanence of the parts in the whole. So when Kant says — you see, you have to pay attention — the phenomenon is the whole of appearance, it's not a mere nuance, he tips over, and that's the whole of Kantianism, that's what makes the greatness of Kantianism and its modernity, its relevance — he tips into the subject. He recalls that everything we wrongly attribute as a property of things comes from us. To put it simply, to understand Kant, you have to imagine we were born with yellow glasses on, and no one ever told us — it stands to reason we'd end up taking yellow as a property of being, of the universe. That's Kantianism. Critique of Pure Reason means critique — not criticism in the sense of a critic tearing apart a literary work — it means examination, it comes from 'crible,' sieve.
52:37 you know, you find the same root, the sieve, the riddle, where you keep what's good and let fall what isn't good — critique of the whole of what our reason can know by itself, purely, before going to seek help from experience. Because, as he says, borrowing financial metaphors, which is interesting, it's not good management to go straight to spending — you first have to see everything you can produce by yourself, and it's when you've reached your limits that you can go borrow from outside — 'borrow from outside' is how he metaphorizes the recourse to experience here. I don't need to resort to experience to know that a dog is a mammal, it's in its very definition, and that's why Kant will tell us: 'the dog is a mammal' is an analytic judgment, 'the triangle is a polygon' is an analytic judgment — meaning I only have to analyze 'triangle' to find 'polygon' inside it, in its very definition — the triangle is a polygon, for example. On the other hand, to know whether a dog is black, white, or yellow, I can't say that from its definition, it's a contingency, a mode as we say in philosophy, an accident, it's not part of its essence, its definition. So there I really need—
53:47 to resort to experience, and to an actual dog, to apprehend its color. There, I can simply — perhaps if I bring you back from a journey into space, from an unknown galaxy — I bring back in my bag an object, I don't show it to you, it's still enclosed in its box, and I say to you, guess what it's like. You can answer me all sorts of things, because you don't need to go billions of kilometers to know that if it's an object, it occupies a space — we all know that, we don't know it, as I just said, in an explicit way, but by reflecting a little: if it's an object, it fills a space, space is part of the categories; if it's an object, it occupies a certain amount of time, in duration — if it lasted less than a billionth of a second, it wouldn't even attain existence; it has a limit, since we say 'an object,' meaning it must have a space, it also has to be bounded. So we know a lot of things before seeing, before going to look. You remember I alluded to Thales last time — that's the Copernican revolution, taking stock of everything I can know before going to look, and then submitting what I see — not submitting myself to what I see, but submitting what I see to the rigor—
54:57 of the reasoning accumulated by the scientific community. So that was this long reminder of what — you'll say, but you say Hegel subscribes — pay tribute — then he criticizes reason as instrument — well, what we're going to see is that Hegel doesn't say Kant is wrong to see thought as an instrument, he says Kant is wrong to be suspicious — Kant is suspicious after all — but he says he doesn't go far enough in his suspicion, and that's what we're going to see in the — or else, if knowledge is not the instrument of our activity but a kind of medium — I told you we'd come back to this, second metaphor — knowledge is a medium that does not leave the thing which is in this medium unaffected. You know Descartes worked a lot on this, phenomena of refraction and refringence, as it's also called in optics — we have the impression the stick is bent in the water, that's an optical illusion, and so it's the medium here, the aquatic medium, that makes us see it distorted. So in both cases, our knowledge, compared to an instrument or a medium—
Distrusting distrust: the thing in itself 56:07 in both cases, distorts the object one wants to study. That's what Hegel is criticizing — in both cases we make use of a means that immediately produces the opposite of its goal, or rather it is a misconception to make use of any means at all. That's why we're going to return to the phenomenon directly, in the phenomenon, without any preliminary methodology. It seems, it's true, that one can remedy this inconvenience through knowledge of the mode of action of an instrument — but of course a Kantian could reply — you see, a nice dialogue — could reply, wait, if I've had yellow glasses since birth and nobody told me, if I manage to become aware that yellow comes from me, that's still progress; I'll go on seeing things as yellow, but that will no longer be my only knowledge, I'll have much better knowledge. I still won't know anything about the object, because Kant does say the thing in itself is unknowable — that's what Hegel is attacking. I know nothing of the thing in itself positively, I don't know if it's like this or like that, but I can know something of it — Kant is never so far from and so close to Hegel — I can know something of the thing in itself, ah really, I could never say anything about it in Kant — I can know something negative about it: the moment I know that yellow comes from my glasses, I know at least—
57:17 that the real in itself is not yellow — that's progress, reason works well, so that's the argument, we've got equality here. It seems, it's true, that one can remedy this inconvenience, that knowledge is a medium and therefore distorts rather than gives an adequate knowledge of the object, for this knowledge makes it possible to deduce from the result the contribution of the instrument — that's exactly what I just said, isn't it — in the representation we make of the absolute thanks to it, and thus makes it possible to obtain the true in its purity. But this correction would only bring us back to our starting point: if we subtract from a formed thing the contribution of the instrument, then the thing — that is, here, the truth — is again for us what it was before this painful effort, an effort which is therefore superfluous if, because of the instrument, the absolute — and here there's a beautiful image, like a bird caught in birdlime, you know, a bird stuck in glue waiting for someone to approach it — if, because of the instrument, the absolute, like a bird caught in birdlime, were only to come somewhat closer to us without anything being changed in it, then it would simply laugh at this ruse if it were not, and did not want to be, in itself
58:27 and for itself, close to us from the start. Knowledge would indeed be, in that case, a ruse, since through its multiform busyness it would give itself the appearance of doing something quite different from merely establishing an immediate and hence easy relation. If, further, the examination of knowledge, which we represent to ourselves as a medium, teaches us to know the law of refraction of the rays, for example, it's still of no use to deduce this refraction from the result, for it is not the deviation of the ray but the ray itself by which the truth touches us that is knowledge, and this ray being subtracted, all that would remain to us is the indication of a pure direction, or an empty place. And here Hegel takes a step — unexpected as an approach, but one that anticipates the most current psychoanalysis, I'm thinking of Lacan — however, if the fear of falling into error — that's very much Descartes, Kant, the philosophy of subjectivity — if the fear of falling into error introduces a mistrust into the science, which without such scruples sets to work by itself and actually knows, it's not clear why, conversely — so let's be more Kantian than Kant, you see, this isn't a critique that goes backward — one should not introduce a mistrust of this mistrust, says Hegel — here he anticipates his 20th-century discovery when a Descartes—
59:38 or a Kant introduces doubt about what is there — I mean it's consciousness that's at work, not the unconscious — the unconscious couldn't care less about all its stratagems, all its protocols, but it will manage to express itself. I'll give an illustration with Descartes later, in an admirable passage on the piece of wax in the second Metaphysical Meditation, where we see everything that brings Descartes close to, that shows Descartes practically initiated the phenomenological activity that continues here, and at the same time what constitutes its limit for his time, precisely regarding this mistrust. So, I repeat this interesting passage: if the fear of falling into error introduces a mistrust into knowledge — knowledge which without such scruples sets to work by itself and actually knows — it's not clear why, conversely, one should not introduce a mistrust of this mistrust, and why one should not fear that this fear of being mistaken is not already error itself. In fact, the great point of contention between Hegel and Kant is this famous file—
1:00:48 of the thing in itself. Kant, quite consistently, says: if we've understood the essence of my message, namely that in what we call the phenomenon there is a mixture — and there he's right, Hegel takes this up — of what is brought to the mind without the mind having anything to do with it, what Kant calls the matter of knowledge, and what is brought by the mind, the categories, the concepts, the way of classifying them, of judging them, that is, what Kant calls the form of knowledge — very rich, the Kantian vision — knowledge is scientific only if it comprises a matter brought to the mind by the sensible and a form brought by the mind, both together. But, says Kant, and it's an apparently coherent deduction, what we will never be able to know is the thing as it is in itself, before my knowledge operates on it, since to know it, for Kant, is already to transform it and therefore to distort it — nor the self either, the two extremes are unknowable, the thing to be known and the knowing self are both unknowable. And that's why in Kant what he calls—
1:01:58 the transcendental I — not the empirical self, the transcendental I — and in Kant what he calls an idea. In Kant, an idea gives us less knowledge than a concept — an idea is regulative, not constitutive. Space is a constitutive concept of bodies, time too; on the other hand, the notion of transcendental I that accompanies all my representations, the cogito, is an idea, so I would say unknowable — it's this unknowable that Hegel wants to show here that Kant still presupposes too much of, he knows too much or too little, if you like. He knows too little in saying that the thing in itself, reality in itself, is unknowable, and so we'll never know how this glass is in itself, because it's distorted by my perception, my sight etc., and by everything we bring to it as subject — but in this sense he knows too little. But he also knows too much, because where does he get this knowledge that a reality in itself exists? In order to avoid idealism, Kant makes the mistake of assuming the existence—
1:03:08 of a reality in itself. So he assumed it from the start — there's no need to try to construct arguments to demonstrate it — it's not that there's a part of reality we'll never reach, it's practically built into his initial division. That's roughly what Hegel develops — I'm telling it to you abstractly first so it will be clearer afterward: in fact this fear presupposes something, it even presupposes a great deal, whereas a philosophical thought should have as few presuppositions as possible. In fact this fear presupposes something, it even presupposes a great deal as truth, and bases its scruples and deductions on this foundation, which would itself first need to be examined to know whether it is the truth. It presupposes representations of knowledge as an instrument and as a medium — that's already a lot of presuppositions — it also presupposes a difference between ourselves and this knowledge, above all it presupposes that the absolute is on one side and it presupposes that knowledge is on another side, separate from the absolute, and yet something real; in other words, it presupposes that knowledge, which is outside the absolute, is also certainly outside the truth, and would yet still be truthful — an admission by which what calls itself fear of error rather makes itself known as fear of the truth. The eye of a true psychoanalyst — this excess of mistrust is rather a fear of truth.
1:04:18 the real face of it, as if one were afraid to know how things are in themselves. So, I wanted to read the beginning of the introduction, and to come back to the Hegel-Kant relationship — believe me, so as not to get mixed up, you have to pay close attention to what you're saying at any given point, because depending on which passage of Hegel's work you're looking at, he either comes down hard on Kant or, on the contrary, puts him on a pedestal. This relationship to Kant is tied, within the Hegelian system itself, to the relationship Hegel maintains with the concept of understanding — the whole ambivalence is there, it's a notion that fits very well — understanding and ambivalence. I had read you a famous passage, moreover, in the preface, where Hegel rehabilitates understanding — it's among our faculties the one most opposed to romantic sensibility. The romantic, of course, placed intuition, the heart, in matters of knowledge—
Hegel's ambivalence toward the understanding 1:05:28 above pure intellection. So, if you have any doubts when I say 'understanding,' think of mathematics — it's a bit reductive, but broadly speaking, if there's one discipline where understanding reaches its perfection, it's mathematics. There, you see, it's not intuitive, it's — the starting point is not an experience, not a sight, not a sensation — the starting point is a statement, even if it's only a first statement, as we say in mathematics, that is, the axioms, the postulates, and the definitions. And then the goal of the game — because that's what everything in mathematics is, still today — is to chain statements together in such a way that they don't contradict the initial statements. The principle that reigns in understanding — and here we see it a bit more concretely — is non-contradiction, and Kant showed very well that this settles nothing about existence. I can perfectly well make a non-contradictory proposition without it referring to anything that exists. I can say a castle with a million rooms has twice as many as a castle with 500,000 rooms — that's a perfectly rigorous statement even if there's no castle with a million rooms anywhere in the universe. It's not a matter here of comparing the word to the thing—
1:06:38 but of comparing words with each other, for there can be contradiction only between — finish my sentence, excuse me, that's my teacher side coming back on holiday — there can be contradiction only between statements, if there is no prior statement to begin with, it's a false problem to ask afterward whether there will be contradiction or not. I'll note in passing that this importance of the initial statement as a starting point is also contained in a tradition belonging to our grandmothers, our aunts, or our sisters — I'm only referring to the female sex — I'm thinking of fairy tales, it's often women who take on this decisive role for the child — thanks to them for telling stories before falling asleep — not only, I see it more often now — so, in our grandmothers' stories, you know, they talk about good fairies at the cradle who give, right from the start, curses or blessings if they're good fairies — it's profoundly meaningful, you know, psychoanalysis knows very well the importance of this. Moreover, psychoanalysis knows that what hurts throughout one's whole life, apart from a few genetically inherited illnesses — that happens too, but still—
1:07:48 if I set aside everything that comes from a bodily disorder — and there you have to appeal to traditional medicine — there are also all the disorders that come from the words we've swallowed. The number of — this castrating mother whose teenage son had just confessed, with great, great difficulty, imagine the poor kid, that he was homosexual — the mother's response, a great socialite: 'My God, and here I thought you were impotent.' There are words that kill, especially when they're words spoken over the cradle — this one is a mechanic, just like his father, in the end, he'll spend his whole life imitating him. So, importance — rationalism is the opposite of empiricism; we're not talking about empeiria, experience, of what comes from outside, ex, we're talking about what is 'in,' words that come from us, not that reach us from outside. Words — so I line up first propositions, then I see everything I can chain onto this first proposition without checking it, that's what understanding is. Hegel has an ambivalent relationship to understanding, he doesn't like—
1:08:58 what in it is separative — he's a man of synthesis, of unity, and for Hegel the true is always the whole. Now understanding separates, it opposes matter and form, time and eternity, consciousness and science — there are millions, I'll skip some — what Kant calls antinomies. So understanding separates. Hegel sees very clearly that this isn't always a fault — there is a deceptive unity, says Hegel, a primitive unity, that of the child who lives in a syncretic world. You know, child psychology has shown this well — it's when the child has gone all the way around its cradle, when it's been weaned, that it will be forced to notice that the world is divided and separated, and what's not in its psychic universe — understanding. But at the same time understanding is a security for thought, a rigor, and in this sense Hegel praises it against the Romantics. So you see, he criticizes understanding to show the limits of Kant, but on the other hand he re-evaluates it when it comes to speaking against the Romantics. I had quoted you part of it earlier
1:10:08 but now I'll continue it — this important passage in the preface where there's a very solemn re-evaluation of understanding, when he says the following. So I remind you that understanding is separation, division, analysis — taking a motor apart piece by piece in the garage, that's the order of analysis, as Lavoisier did with air, with its components, oxygen, hydrogen, water. The analysis of a representation as it was ordinarily conducted was nothing other than the process of removing the form of its well-known being — decomposing a representation, that's the work of understanding, decomposing, analyzing, decomposing, dividing, separating — decomposing a representation into its original elements, these into molecules, molecules into atoms, atoms into nuclei and electrons, pure opposition — decomposing a representation into its original elements consists in reducing it to those moments which no longer have even the form of the representation as found, but constitute the immediate property of the self. The activity of dividing — and here it becomes solemn.
1:11:18 the activity of dividing is the force and the labor of understanding — and here it's underlined — of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of the absolute power — it's a veritable nuclear energy, infinite, psychic of course, understanding. Opposed to understanding, Hegel puts the circle that rests — the opposite of the separated — the circle is well closed, nothing is separated — the circle that rests within itself, closed upon itself, and which, as substance, holds all its moments, is the immediate relation which arouses no astonishment. But that the accident as such, separated — sorry — but that the accident as such, separated from its surroundings, that what is bound and effectively real only in its connection to something else should attain a separate existence and a distinct freedom — we're going to isolate, in the triangle, a side or an angle or its height — that the accident as such, separated from its surroundings, what is bound and effectively real only in its connection to something else, should attain a separate existence and a distinct freedom — that is the prodigious power of the negative, the energy of thought, of the pure self. So, here are things you should get used to putting on the same side.
1:12:29 if you make little charts to find your way around: negativity, understanding, abstraction — you remember how much he criticized abstraction last time, but at the same time he praises it. He criticizes it when it's unaware of itself, in particular immediate sensory knowledge — we think we contain the whole of the real because we haven't said anything yet, we're just there looking at it, and in fact it's the poorest — we've abstracted away all the determinations that are actually at work. And then there's the good abstraction, isn't there, the one that goes all the way to the end of its activity of dividing. So I take it up again and continue: that the accident as such, separated from its surroundings, what is bound and real only in its connection to something else, should attain a separate existence and a distinct freedom — understood, in thought or in discourse — that is the prodigious power of the negative, the energy of thought, of the pure self. Here there's a return to Kant and Fichte, who provide reagents for understanding, that's why I wanted to read the introduction alongside — death, if we want to call this unreality that — analyzing a thing, decomposing it, that will kill it — a dismantled car isn't a car that runs — death, if we want to call this unreality by that name, is the most fearsome thing
1:13:39 and holding firmly to what is dead is what demands the greatest strength — and here there's a Romantic allusion — beauty without strength hates understanding — the verb 'to hate,' of course, because understanding expects of beauty what it's not able to accomplish. It's not this life that shrinks back in horror from death — that's a narcissistic retreat — and keeps itself pure of destruction; you can clearly see the narcissistic side — but the life that endures death and maintains itself within death itself, that is the true life of spirit. Spirit wins its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment. Here we can see a bit better, more concretely than before, coming out of the ambivalences, the status of understanding — it's good insofar as it separates and thus frees us from the prejudices that were ours when we were within the calm and comfortable unity of opinion, of habit, of habitual thought — you know, what is well-known, because it is well-known, says Hegel, is not known. But then this division must itself be superseded — and that is the work of reason, a faculty which for Hegel stands above understanding and continues the work of negation—
Sense-certainty: the now and the here 1:14:49 of understanding, but which applies these negations to the negation of understanding itself. If that seems a bit complicated, I'll go straight to the text and we'll take it as our own application, it will be much simpler — not the text of the preface, but of the introduction — but for the first time, we had to wait until this third session — the very first lines of the Phenomenology of Spirit, after the preface and the introduction. So now we're there, we're in the discourse, not about the thing, but the discourse of the thing itself — the phenomenon is going to speak, we'll need to record it, and this very beginning has to be heard — illustrated, yes yes, we're recording, yes yes, as you say, but French plays very well with these two senses. This very beginning is a chapter called 'Sense-Certainty' — I'll say clearly what it means: I am certain of seeing — sorry, there's a glass on the table — sense-certainty, where the 'this' and my aiming, and my aiming at the 'this,' that's the title of this chapter. And it begins like this, the first line: knowledge which, at first, immediately, without mediation — I set aside my prejudices, my thoughts, my reasoning, my ideology — the knowledge
1:16:00 That which is first immediately our object can only be that which is itself immediate knowledge, knowledge of the immediate or of the existent — the discourse of German idealism — the existent, Seiende, that means: in the meantime it is there — it's not of the order of being, no, no, precisely, it's not of the order of being. I see a dog of yellow color — I mention this since we spoke of the color of the dog earlier — but I can see it in a dream, a dog of yellow color, that doesn't mean that it is, that it exists. This being so, as we say in French, very well, this being so, without yet knowing whether it belongs to the order of being or of appearing or of illusion — we're not there yet, there we already know too much — let's return to the immediate, knowledge of the immediate or of the existent. We must comport ourselves toward it in a no less immediate manner, or receive this knowledge as the mirror did earlier — receive this knowledge as it offers itself, without altering it in anything, and simply let this apprehension, independent of all conception, the concrete content of sense-certainty — look around you, you don't have to go very far to look around yourself — make it appear immediately as the richest knowledge, indeed as a knowledge of such infinite richness that no limit can be found in it, think
1:17:10 of the number of molecules that are in this time — there are billions upon billions — the richest, as a knowledge of infinite richness such that one can find no limit in it, neither in extension in the space and time in which it unfolds, nor in penetration into the fragment extracted from this plenitude by division. One thinks one has isolated a molecule, but it is still divided, an atom, which divides into nucleus and electron, which divides into quark, into charm, into color and into boson. This knowledge appears moreover as the truest — yes, I haven't said anything yet — and the truest, for it has not yet set aside anything of the object but has it entirely before it in its full plenitude. In fact, however, here he anticipates the result: this attitude reveals itself expressly as the most abstract and the poorest truth. Of what it knows — there's a turning point here — of what it knows, sensory knowledge, sense-certainty, there, I see that — sense-certainty, there is what it knows, and there is what it expresses of it as soon as it wants to communicate it, make a scientific treatise of it, what it expresses of it as soon as it passes into words, if you prefer — of what it knows it expresses only this: it is; and its truth contains only the being of the thing. For its part
1:18:20 in this certainty consciousness is only as pure I, and I am only as pure this — so there are two things, a pure this and a pure this-one who observes this pure this. We must therefore consider the object to see whether, in fact, in sense-certainty itself, it is indeed an essence such as it claims to be — whether sense-certainty, if its concept of being, of essential reality, indeed corresponds to its mode of presence in this certainty. For this purpose we do not need to reflect deeply on it — we have immediate consciousness of it — we do not need to reflect deeply on what it might truly be, but we must consider it only as it has it within itself. It is therefore itself that must be questioned: what is the this, whatever this it may be — what is the this? Let us take it under the double aspect of its being — it's not under the temporal, I'm adding that — let's take it under the double aspect of its being, as the now and as the here. There you have it, the great triad of certainty, of all sense-certainty: this, here, now — we're not dealing with things in general, bodies in general — let's take it under the double aspect
1:19:30 of its being as the now and as the here — both are underlined, now and here. Then the dialectic that it contains will take on a form just as intelligible as the this itself. To the question: what is the now, since we're told that the truth is what is here and now, then let's ask: what is the now? We will answer, for example, the now is the night — it happens that here it's day, he should have written the night — the now is the night. To test the truth of this sense-certainty — he's being a bit ironic — to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice: we write down this truth, and he adds, a truth loses nothing by being written down, nor can it lose anything by being preserved. Let us look again now, at noon, at this truth: we shall then have to say that it has gone stale — the now is no longer the night, the now is the day. Oh dear, so there's a form that has remained — now — but the content has changed. The now that was the night, says Hegel, is preserved — I'm reading this to you now, live, for the first time, one of the texts considered the most difficult — it's actually quite clear when you make the effort to pay attention to what's being said. The now that is night is preserved, what does he mean by that? There's always a now, whether at noon or at midnight, there's always a now
1:20:40 so the now is preserved, that is to say it is treated as that for which it passed itself off, as an existent, but it proves rather, as now, to be a non-existent. To be sure, the now itself is indeed preserved, but as a now such that it is not the night — it's no longer that. Likewise with regard to the day that is now actual, the now maintains itself, but as a now such that it is not the day — or as a negative in general. This is Hegel's greatest discovery, negativity: the now that maintains itself spends its time suppressing all particular nows. This now that is preserved is therefore not immediate — the one that is preserved, the true one, which means that when we say 'now' we are saying something roughly true, roughly — we shall see afterward that it's much more complicated. This now that is preserved is, says Hegel, a mediated and negative now, that is to say, we obtain it through mediation — it's in this sense that it is mediate and not immediate — by having suppressed the day-now, the night-now, etc., and it is negative because all these contents must indeed be suppressed. This now that is preserved is thus not immediate but mediated, for it is determined as that which remains
1:21:50 and maintains itself through the fact that something else — namely day and night — is no longer, and yet it is still just as simple as before: whether it's noon or midnight, we say 'now,' and in this simplicity, indifferent to whatever is playing out beside it — just as little are day and night its being; just as little, and just as much, it is still day and night, and it is in no way affected by this being-other. Such a simple moment, which through the mediation of negation is neither this nor that, but only a not-this, and which is just as indifferent to being this or that, we call a universal — we call it a first sample. What he calls the concrete universal, this is it: someone in New York is saying right now, 'it's five o'clock,' someone in Tokyo has different moments, and this doesn't matter, there is indeed a universal now — and Hegel goes so far as to say it is language that is right, language is in the element of the universal, for what is preserved in all cases is a universal now. It is also as a universal that we pronounce the sensible — what we say is 'this'; indeed, when you want to express the singularity of a thing — Hegel, this is interesting
1:23:01 what he shows us is very curious, there's an odd paradox: when we truly want to express a thing in what is unique to it, singular to it, in what it does not share in common with others — I'm not talking about dogs in general but about this dog here, mine, who wags his tail when I come home — we use the most general words. It's strange, I say 'this dog here,' but in front of any dog you could say 'this dog here,' the same statement. And so Hegel arrives at this conclusion — I told you right away — what I say contradicts what I am aiming at — not aim, there's the aiming — what I say belies what I am aiming at, or again, what I indicate — indicated comes from index — I've pointed to the this, here, now, with my finger, I'm specifying these things not to make detours, Dominique, but to recall that the indicated — if I linger on the index and the indicated, it's because we spoke earlier of dogmatism and skepticism. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, alludes to one of the most formidable skeptics, Cratylus, who was supposed to be a disciple of Heraclitus — well yes, when you think that everything flows
1:24:11 everything changes, etc., all knowledge becomes problematic, and once you utter a statement it's already falsified, of course, because the order of time has already changed the validity of that statement. Now Cratylus, very consistent, doesn't care — Aristotle mocks him, but at the same time it's consistent, it's absolute skepticism, that is, in order not to risk being in error, he had decided to keep quiet, never open his mouth again, and just point at things, indicate them — if I say 'Socrates is young' that's already, already false — so, all I do is point. So Aristotle mocks him, of course, with his wagging finger he doesn't get very far in terms of knowledge. So let's apply the dialectic of the now — you've had a first sample of dialectic at work — to the here-now, to the spatial part; the same thing happens for the other form of the this, that is, for the here. The here is, for example, the tree — that's his example — I turn around, this truth has disappeared and has changed into its opposite: the here is not a tree, rather a house. The here itself does not disappear, as with the now — there's always a here wherever I am — but it is, and remains, in the disappearance of the house, of the tree
1:25:21 etc., it is furthermore indifferent to being house or tree. Once again the this shows itself as mediated simplicity, or as universality. Sense-certainty demonstrates within itself the universal as the truth of its object — this wasn't expected at the outset, we thought it had to do with the opposite of the universal, the particular, what is here-this-now — yes, but that's what I'm aiming at, but what I say is the universal, it's what I say of every this-here-now. So sense-certainty demonstrates within itself the universal as the truth of its object. Pure being is then what remains as its essence, but no longer as an immediate, but as something such that mediation and negation are essential to it. We've gained something, we're not going in circles — we know that the truth of the now and the here is to be sought in us, and not in things — that's what he's just shown. What remains, then, is not the day, is not the night — what remains is no longer what we were aiming at as being, but being with the determination of being abstraction, or the pure universal — and our 'avis' [opinion], A-V-I-S, in which there is 'vision' — and our opinion on which the true of sense-certainty is not the universal — is what alone remains in the face of this empty and indifferent now and here. So let us compare
1:26:32 the relation in which knowledge and object first arose, with their relation as it comes to be presented in this result. We see a reversal of the relation: the object, which was supposed to be the essential — I'm an empiricist, I only attach myself to what is before me — the object, which was supposed to be the essential, is now the inessential of sense-certainty, for the universal that it has become is no longer such that the object ought essentially to have been. Certainty has now passed over into its opposite, that is, into knowledge, into the subject, simply into the knowing which was previously the inessential. Its truth is in the object as my object, or in the meant-as-mine — it is, because I have a knowledge of it — he rediscovers Descartes here, if you look closely, but he rediscovers it within the order of the thing. Sense-certainty is thus indeed expelled from the object, but is not yet suppressed — it is only pushed back into the I. We must see what experience shows us regarding this reality of sense-certainty — I won't deny myself, as a bit of light relief and humor, the pleasure of reading you what he says at one point to mock those who cling to Saint-Thomas-ness, 'I only believe what I see and what I touch,' who are very, very far, not only from philosophy, but from science, from several centuries of science
Certainty and truth, the Hegelian spiral 1:27:42 on the occasion of this reference to universal experience, let it be permitted to us to anticipate on the domain of the practical with the following consideration: one can say to those who affirm this truth, this certainty of the reality of sensible objects, that they should go back to the elementary schools of wisdom, back precisely to the ancient mysteries of Eleusis, of Ceres and of Bacchus. They must first learn the secret of eating the bread and drinking the wine — you wonder what this has to do with anything, you'll see — for the one initiated into these mysteries arrives not only at doubting the being of sensible things but even at despairing of it. There's a play on words that is lost if you don't know German: doubt is Zweifel, and despair is Verzweiflung — a doubt that has despair in it. On the one hand the initiate accomplishes the annihilation of these things, since he eats the bread, he drinks the wine, he annihilates the sensible, he doesn't merely look at it. He, the initiate into these mysteries, arrives not only at doubting the being of sensible things but even at despairing of it — on the one hand he accomplishes the annihilation of these things, and on the other he sees them accomplish this annihilation themselves, which reveals that they are nothingness. Even the animals are not excluded from this wisdom, but are rather deeply
1:28:52 initiated into it, for it does not remain before sensible things as if they were in-themselves, but despairs of this reality, and in the absolute certainty of their nothingness, simply seizes them and consumes them — to the point that Hegel will say, in a striking passage, that the animal is the first idealist — it makes the real pass into itself, it's the subject that triumphs. That was humor, of course, but it was to remind us how much we trap ourselves with these words — and that's why I go back to the very beginning of this very beginning: certainty — the title was Sense-Certainty, where the this is my aiming at the this. And to remember about Hegel: certainty is always opposed to truth — there's a long way from certainty to truth — there again, a difference with Descartes. Certainty is a criterion, but far from truth — Descartes's work, especially his scientific work, illustrates very well that he himself did not hold to immediate certainties — few philosophers have done as much to free themselves from the immediate as Descartes. But with Hegel it becomes a rule: certainty, we would say today
1:30:02 is ideological assent — I have such an interest in it being true that it has a force that I take for the truth, but it is never anything more than the force of certainty, to put it plainly. For millennia it was absolutely certain, and no one denied it, that the earth was immobile and the sun turned around it — there's a long way from certainty to truth. To understand what's at stake in these differences, I'll close the parenthesis here on this little dichotomy — one just needs to remember that to reach the truth one must fight against many of the certainties in which we were simply locked, and this doesn't happen all at once — that's a small difference from the— well, you see. I read you this sample of the Phenomenology for the first time — we're in the thing itself, truly in the concrete, here-now, and we see how the thing itself transforms before us — that's exactly what the second phenomenological school will do, that of Husserl in the twentieth century, which had such great importance in the post-war period, even though Husserl lived before that — and there are of course
1:31:12 important differences, but what they still have in common is the project — this need to make a return to the things themselves in every phenomenological undertaking, this need to escape the labyrinth of abstractions and to test everything one might have thought, discoursed on, etc., by a return to the things themselves, immediacy — even if it means that the things teach us what to think, but it's from things that we learn, and it's not for us to decree, by some timeless wisdom, that the sensible is deceptive, as Descartes often says — it must be the object itself that shows us how unreliable it is. As we saw earlier with the now disappearing — I'll close the sequence on the now, since it's worth its weight in gold, with this little phrase which would have been illegible a few days ago but which, I hope, I'm sure, will now seem much clearer to you: 'we are shown the now' — the partisans of sense-certainty — 'this now here'; in reality now it has — and this is a very tightly packed passage — now it has already ceased to be when it is shown; the now that is, is another
1:32:22 than the one that is shown. One could say that between 'now' and 'now' there have already been billions of intervals of seconds, if you think about it a little — so it's not now, the now that is, is another than the one shown, and we see that the now is precisely this: not to be already, when it is. You see, you have to get used to the order of time to understand Hegel — you have to be more of a musician than a sculptor. The advantage in space and in the plastic arts is that all the parts are simultaneous — there's a house, the door is there, the windows are there, the living room is there, all at the same clock-time, at noon — that's what's called partes extra partes, parts alongside one another; space is the order of simultaneities. Time is the order of succession. If I want to describe the same house to a friend who is on vacation, who is far from me, I communicate it to him in writing — it won't be simultaneous, I mean, we go in through a Virginia-style entrance with columns etc., then afterward there's a vestibule, then we're in the successive. As soon as we're in the order of time, as in music, in poetry, or in cinema, we're in the order of succession — this is an important reminder
1:33:33 so, to get you a little familiar with this language, that of the dialectic of things: now, it has already ceased to be when it is shown; the now that is, is another than the one shown, and we see that the now is precisely this, not to be already when it is. The now, as it is shown to us, is a past, and that is its truth — it does not have the truth of being, the now does not have the truth of being, it disappears too quickly. A little anecdote about being: there are journalists who follow great men everywhere — even back then, Hegel was visiting the Swiss Alps, he's standing in front of Mont Blanc, 'Mr. Philosopher, what impression does Mont Blanc make on you?'
1:34:12 'It is' — es ist — is what he answered. That, yes, doesn't move around too much. The now doesn't have that truth. And yet it is true that it has been, but what has been, what is past, is in fact not at all essence — what has been is no longer, it is not, and it was being that we were dealing with. There you have a lovely sequence of Hegelian statements. And at the same time you see all the syntheses: we say indeed, we have a now to start with, now I'm in the instant, I'm not in time — bang, that shatters — antithesis, change, becoming — synthesis, we return to the now, there is a now, but it's not the one from the start, it's not in things, it's in us — we've made progress. Synthesis of linear thinking and circular thinking, the one that dominates today — I'll ask you a little question about that, tell me: what geometrical figure manages to make a synthesis of linear progress and circular rotation, what geometrical figure — yes, bravo, the spiral, exactly — the Hegelian system
The piece of wax and the dream argument 1:35:24 proceeds like a spiral, that is to say, on one hand we progress, but we progress while returning each time to the starting point, enriched with a new determination, enriched with knowledge, etc. There you go, for those who like images. So this return to things, this return to the immediate to see how the immediate itself becomes mediated independently of the mediations that we impose on it through our ideologies, thoughts, and our abstract ideas — this return to things that takes place here in this text, which was truly a great novelty, and which Husserl will systematize in the twentieth century, was initiated by René Descartes. I'm going to read you a passage here that is perhaps — the word didn't exist yet, 'phenomenology,' in Descartes's time, but if there was a sketch of phenomenology of spirit, this is why I read this passage — first you'll see the kinship — if there was a sketch of the phenomenological project, it is indeed Descartes's Metaphysical Meditations, undoubtedly his most developed, most important work from the point of view of demonstration — the Discourse on Method is a masterpiece, but the demonstrations
1:36:34 are not as thoroughly worked out as in the Meditations, so I take the second one — there are six — the second meditation. The first left us on a failure — you make a full assessment of everything one can doubt, and Descartes with the Pharmakon — no, that's not it, that one can doubt everything, but anyway, we move to the second meditation, and a return to the things themselves — and Husserl will pay a very great tribute — in Paris, Husserl gave lectures, he had been invited to the Collège de France, he gave lectures on his work Logische Untersuchungen, the Logical Investigations, and he paid great tribute here in Paris to Descartes, saying he initiated the phenomenological approach. And so I'll read you the passage that, to my mind, best illustrates this point: 'Let us begin by considering the things that are most common, and which we believe we understand most distinctly, namely the bodies that we touch and that we see' — there we are, like Hegel, at sense-certainty — the bodies that we touch and that we see — 'I do not mean to speak of bodies in general' — the same wariness as Hegel about abstract things
1:37:44 'I do not mean to speak of bodies in general, for these general notions are ordinarily more confused, but of one in particular. Let us take for example this' — the demonstrative reminds us of the index finger earlier — 'this' can only refer to what is here and now, not the — this piece of wax' — this is the famous passage over which so many students have labored, isn't it, the piece of wax. To understand what follows, let me remind you that at the time — since they lit their homes with candles, there was no paraffin wax — it was beeswax; to understand what follows, the qualities he's going to attribute to the wax — it's not stearin, it was much better, it's wax that smelled sweet, isn't it, that smelled of honey, quite simply. 'Let us take for example this piece of wax which has just been taken from the honeycomb' — I'm glad to return not to a translated text but to an original French text, because it's admirable, the tense of the expression — 'it has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey it contained' — the piece of wax — 'it still retains something of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered' — in short, all the sensible qualities, it has a smell, it has a sweet taste
1:38:55 'its color, its shape, its size are apparent; it is hard, it is cold, one touches it, and if you want to strike it, it will give off some sound' — it won't be the same as if I do this or if I do that — 'in short, everything that can distinctly make a body known' — so we're at sense-certainty, what can make it known, that is? Its sensible qualities — 'everything that can distinctly make a body known is found in this one. But now, while I am speaking' — we're on the threshold of tragedy here, since everything was going well up to now, but — 'now, while I am speaking, one brings it near the fire — the piece of wax — whatever remained of its taste evaporates' — the smell fades away, it's more the smell of burning than the smell of honey — 'its color changes, its shape is lost, its size increases' — the heat expands bodies, its size increases — 'it becomes liquid, it heats up' — whereas it was cold — 'one can scarcely touch it, and however much one strikes it, it will no longer give off any sound.' Well now
1:40:05 good grief, I thought I had something solid there — what makes a body known with certainty, apart from all the doubtful stuff? Its immediate, sensible manifestation, its sensible qualities — its smell fades away, what is the piece of wax? A white sweet-smelling thing? Well, no, now it's become yellow, and that says — the problem is not yet posed — Descartes poses the question, a philosopher's question: does the same wax remain after this change?
1:40:38 that doesn't seem like much to you, but that's a great step forward in thought — 'the same wax' — well, you can very well wax your floor without asking yourself the question, that's not knowledge — does the same wax remain after this change? You can already reason it out: if you define a body by its sensible qualities, the wax has disappeared, your definition is no longer valid, since white has become yellow, etc. — it's not the same at all, or if it is the same, then there's something sensible you haven't told us, or which doesn't appear in the sensible — the problem is to see whether it's really the same. We were deceived, sorry?
1:41:16 'we were deceived' — by whom? I don't know, I have no idea, I don't know. No, but it's interesting, because Descartes invented a character, the evil genius, the deceiver — yes, it's the same — yes, Descartes brings in the evil genius, it's the summit, the height of doubt in his thought, when he says — well, I'll go fast here — now sensible things are deceptive, and then there's the argument from dreaming, the strongest in Descartes, which topples all sense-certainty definitively, yet it's said that the dream is reality — let's follow his progression. When he says: I doubt the sensible, but after all, says Descartes, who still has his feet on the ground, I mean he's a warrior at heart, a man of action, don't try to feed him nonsense, he brought back pirates, handed them over to the English police after a mutiny on a ship, at swordpoint — he says: the senses deceive us when they're distant, he tries to hold on to that at one point: a sound in the distance, a rumbling — is it a truck, is it a plane, is it thunder, who knows — but the senses close at hand, one cannot doubt, there, that's settled, this is the table, I cannot doubt that — good grief, one can't claim about the table that it isn't on the table
1:42:26 and he says there's something even closer — what is closer, as sensible thing, for each of us, than the whole sensible universe that we see, feel, hear, taste? What is closer? Well, our own body. We set that aside — look, this is getting serious — he draws up the full tally of everything one can doubt — 'but although the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things which are little sensible and very far away, there are perhaps many others of which one cannot reasonably doubt, although we know them by their means — for example, that I am sitting' — well, that's me, right now, pay attention, it's no longer even the object in front of me — 'that I am here, sitting by the fire' — try to imagine Descartes in his dressing gown, thoroughly disheveled, that's exactly it — 'for example, that I am here sitting by the fire, dressed in a dressing gown' — that's why I made that allusion — 'holding this paper in my hands' — you see he's looking at himself here, and a little doubt — and something else — 'and how could I deny that these hands and this body'
1:43:36 'are mine' — well, some people deny that, they deny it, even back then — 'I don't have a body, I have ten hands' — that makes me think of all the romantics who are mad and who... — yes but that's not wrong, the mad, not the romantics, the mad in general — and Descartes takes this into account and says: unless it be perhaps that I compare myself to those insane persons — and here's where things go — those insane persons whose brain is so troubled and clouded by the dark vapors of bile' — a rather archaic conception of madness — 'that they constantly assert that they are kings when they are very poor, that they are dressed in gold and purple when they are stark naked, or imagine themselves to be jugs or to have a body of glass' — they knew their clinical cases well — 'but they are mad — we'll poke fun at that a little — but they are mad, I would be no less extravagant if I modeled myself on their example.' There I interrupt, and let's talk a bit about Foucault — some years back, it's based on this passage that a philosopher of the importance you can imagine, Foucault — there's not a kid in the humanities, in political science, etc.
Against Foucault; the unity of the wax is in the word 1:44:45 who isn't into Foucault or Deleuze. Foucault bases himself on this passage to say: you see, that's clear proof that at that time nobody understood madness — Descartes sets aside from himself and from humanity the mad, who are not really men, and it's precisely at that time that people begin to build what is true — the first asylums, asylums in the modern sense, the 'great confinement' as he calls it — the moment when reason appears, it excludes madness from itself, the coherent reasoning of Foucault, etc. It's not that it's false, it's dishonest — that's different — because I haven't told you the rest: 'but they are mad, I would be no less extravagant if I modeled myself on their examples' — if it stopped there, Foucault would be right, full stop. However — Descartes's humility, self-humbling, the great thought that Hegel would have admired, the true 'I' who reads this proposition — 'however, I have here to consider that I am a man, and consequently that I am accustomed to sleep and to represent to myself in my dreams the same things, or sometimes less plausible ones, than the insane do when awake. How many times has it happened to me to dream at night that I was in this place, that I was dressed'
1:45:56 we've all had those dreams — 'that I was by the fire, although I was quite naked in my bed' — ladies, try to imagine Descartes naked in his bed — 'it seems to me now that it is not with sleeping eyes that I look at this paper' — you see, doubt has taken hold of him — it seems to me, I'm not sure — 'it seems to me now that it is not with sleeping eyes that I look at this paper, that this head that I move' — you see, as we say, 'pinch me' — he's moving his head anyway to wake himself up — 'that the head which I move is not drowsy, that it is with intention and deliberate purpose that I extend this hand and that I feel it' — admirable, admirable — 'what happens in sleep is not so clear nor so distinct as all this' — there's a back-and-forth between certainty and then the doubt takes hold again, and yet the doubt returns — 'when I think about it carefully, I recall having often been deceived while sleeping by similar illusions, and dwelling on this thought' — I reassure you — 'I see so manifestly that there is no' — there's no — 'there is no conclusive sign nor any mark certain enough by which one could clearly distinguish waking from sleep' — no sensible criteria in any case, it's certainly not by what we see
1:47:06 and what we touch — I see a yellow dog in a dream — that's the launching point of my long detour through Descartes — whether I see it in reality or in a dream, I see a yellow dog, what matters, says Hegel, is the content of this vision, so I'll finish here — 'there is no conclusive sign nor any mark certain enough by which one could clearly distinguish waking from sleep, and I am quite astonished by it' — we're in the seventeenth century, this is a thunderclap — 'astonished' means, well, it means, my, this astonishes me, it's stunning — 'I am quite astonished, and my astonishment is such that it is almost capable' — and this is the end of this admirable chapter — 'of persuading me that I am dreaming.' Deception — yes, deception of Foucault — because not only is it false — it would be false, I deceive myself a thousand times more than Foucault, that's not the question — but all the same there's bad faith, because he knows this text well, Foucault, he knows perfectly well that by continuing on, not only does Descartes not set the madman aside, does not alienate him from himself — alienus means 'the other' — which is Foucault's whole thesis — but on the contrary he makes him a brother, since he says: I am like them — let's be clear, I am a man — he rises to the genus, mad or sane, no matter, we are men, therefore we sleep, and since we sleep it happens to all of us to be mad — and Freud will take up
1:48:16 this parallel between the dream, which is a normal neurosis, in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. There you have it — so I wanted to pay this tribute here to Descartes — I'm not done with Descartes, I've finished for now with this hero by whom everything began — the argument of the — or as Péguy says, 'this French horseman who set off at such a good pace' — but that's Hegel's quotation, he was beginning — I don't know anymore that the others — everything began, of course, in the Encyclopedia everything began again, of course. So let's return to the piece of wax — we defined it spontaneously, phenomenologically — that's where Descartes is a phenomenologist avant la lettre — as it presents itself there will be sensible qualities — except, well, they disappear — it's Heraclitus who triumphs, panta rhei, everything flows, we never bathe twice in the same river, there is no identity, there is only difference, etc., etc., etc. — one must always seek French identity, well, even for the smallest individual there is no identity, there's not a single cell of our body — there are billions upon billions of them — that remains identical to itself for a single instant, the prodigious chemical exchanges — yes, but that doesn't stop me from saying 'I am' while I become
1:49:26 so, does the same wax remain after this change? What then did we know so distinctly in this piece of wax? There is indeed an identity of the wax, but it becomes — and this is the progress the philosopher, in this case Descartes, makes us take — it becomes problematic. It is no longer given, as it was a moment ago, when it was enough to enumerate sensible qualities — one must look for something a bit more sophisticated. The fact that it is now white, now yellow, now smelling of honey, now smelling of burning, now cube-shaped, now whatever, no shape at all, in the process of melting — I read you a short passage on purpose to show now the limits of Descartes when he poses his question — historical limits, not individual ones — 'does the same wax remain after this change?' Question mark — immediately you have the answer: 'one must admit that it remains, and no one can deny it.' So then, what did we know, says Descartes, with such certainty? The question is no longer whether the same wax remains after this change — he's already, already carried it out before dealing with the question, he's already carried it out — certainly it remains and no one could deny it. There's a weak point there, and I pay tribute to Descartes in the end for this weak point, for this weak point
1:50:36 where, when Descartes — I mean here the point where habits return — is that he is not being Cartesian — that is, in his method, the famous principle of method stated in the Discourse on Method, it's clearly stated: examine thoughts carefully and admit nothing more in them than what presents itself so clearly and so distinctly that I have had no occasion to call it in doubt, and carefully avoid prejudice and precipitation — but here he rushed. Well, it happens to all of us, there's no error among the great either, but here you clearly see — it's over — the sequence which was purely phenomenological, because the question is no longer about whether there is an identity of the wax itself — it's there, this identity — but in what does it consist? The question concerns essence and no longer existence. I compare this with a passage found a bit further on than the now-here, well, the passage on sense-certainty, page 101 for those who have the old Hyppolite edition, the Hyppolite translation, where, after having compared the thing — hello Chloé — to its properties exactly like the piece of wax, they also say
1:51:47 one then says of the thing, look, it has the same color as the piece of wax in Descartes, it is white, it is also cubic, it is also sapid — you see there's an echo — 'and insofar as it is cubic, it is also white, it is not sapid' — and he says: the act of positing in a One, capital O, the act of positing its properties into a One belongs only to consciousness, which must then avoid letting them coincide in the thing itself — it's this old habit of substance which we've had for millennia, which caused Descartes to be pushed toward seeing unity in the wax itself, whereas what Hegel has just taught us — and it's a step that perhaps could only be made thanks to Kant, but that Kant himself had not made, the step we've just taken — is that the unity of the piece of wax is nowhere but in us, it's in the word. One cannot reproach Descartes for not having the twentieth century's linguistic discovery, still — there's only the word that remains: the wax was white, now it's yellow, the grammatical subject remains, we're within a verbal game, everything else has changed, everything that is empirically observable reality of the wax has changed. Maybe in other languages
Language determines perception 1:52:57 it would be a different word — sorry? Maybe in other languages it would be a different word, you mean — I'm not sure I understood correctly, I don't agree, I didn't understand — maybe the piece of wax, hard, solid, etc., and the melted wax, in another language wouldn't have the same word — oh, absolutely, of course — oh no, no, it's not just maybe, you're all the more right — all the more right since the division of sensible qualities isn't at all the same across different languages. We've had almost a century of considerable linguistic progress — I mean linguistics in the strict sense, not the philosophical study of language but the study of specific languages — and for colors, for example, there are two examples, from the clinic — we'll talk about aphasics — and in certain ethnic groups of West Africa, I'm thinking in particular of the Ewe of Togo, who were studied extensively in linguistics, by Benveniste in particular, who did his course on general linguistics — you have — but it's the same in Bambara in Mali — what I'm going to say, I'll start with the clinical case, it was observed
1:54:07 that there were aphasics — aphasics are not people with eye disease, they see perfectly well, aphasics are people afflicted with a language disorder — stuttering is a very mild form of aphasia, it's not serious — it can be something much more severe, whole sets of words an aphasic is unable to pronounce. It happens that the case observed here was a patient unable to name colors — that was his particular pathology, let's not dwell on the causes, etc. — he couldn't manage to name colors; when given fabric samples to sort by basic shades, he'd put a triangular red piece of fabric with a blue one, or a round piece of fabric with a spot in the bottom right with a yellow piece of fabric with a spot in the bottom right — he kept changing his sorting principle to classify them, color never came to him because he didn't have the word. You see how clearly the presence or absence of a word determines our perception — and he's right, in a sense, he isn't sick in the eyes, he sees just as well as we do — it's in language that the trouble lies. Now in our language, in French, thank you for making your question precise, we take a noun 'blue' and an epithet, 'navy blue,' 'royal blue,' 'sky blue' to differentiate — there's a substance, a subject, 'blue'
1:55:17 as if there were a blue in itself — visually that's not obvious, maybe navy blue is closer to black or to certain browns in terms of light vibrations than to the clearest, most transparent blue, than to sky blue — and so the patient is perfectly right to have trouble sorting his samples, he'll put navy blue with black as a dark object, for example. Now in African languages, the Ewe, you see, who aren't sick at all, there's a word that means roughly all the colors that we put under orange, brown, red — you see, everything that's a bit carmine red — they won't put vermillion red in it, everything that's a bit dark won't go there — it won't produce the same vision of the world, that's for sure, you're perfectly right, more than us. And I'll give you a third example — these are experiments that were done — several Europeans are made to listen, each with a different language, of course, a Czech, a Pole, a Belgian, a French person, a Fleming — they're made to hear sounds, someone tapping at regular intervals on a table, a table behind them so they can't see, and periodically, but in a regular manner, an accent is stressed
1:56:27 there's an accent, if you like, how to put it, in music, say every three beats — bang, there's a beat a bit more marked than the others — and each participant is asked — that's the point of the operation — on which beat is the accent, is it on the first, the third, the fourth beat? Surprise: no two of them agree. Their ears aren't defective, we didn't pick people with hearing difficulties, we picked perfectly normal people. But what's even more interesting in the experiment is that it teaches us that each person hears the accent at the position that corresponds to the tonic accent in their own language. We have a linguistic unconscious — and as a Hegelian, this doesn't bother me at all, when you see the solemn introduction to the Logic where Hegel says that we think according to language, and that it is the language, logos, that must not be forgotten in logic — logos, that's not all, logos also means fraction, proportion, ratio, whatever you like, but anyway it means already this: we think according to language. You might have some questions?
Judging is not seeing: expression 1:57:26 about this passage? There you go. So I still wanted to remind you that the passage on sense-certainty ended with Hegel with a little summary where he says — I just wanted to point something out — we spoke of nominalism, of the word, of the epithet we're going to choose, but behind it there's the determination, that's actually what's going to interest Hegel more — quite right, we're at the surface, and as long as we stay at sense-certainty — fortunately there are other ways of knowing the real than the senses, that's where we see the history of science — it's not just a matter of naming, the determination is that there's still a determination that must eventually be stated — and so we'll see the definition, what must be said, to express it, to express it — the great seventeenth-century theory of expression, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, it's a beautiful inheritance, the theory of expression, I mean it's useless, an abstraction, if it doesn't express itself in the concrete — that didn't fall on deaf ears, because he goes on to say that the interior is recognized by the fact that it expresses itself — you see the dialectic, remember my example of the fish
1:58:36 that I catch while scuba diving, and I'm so disappointed when I bring them back up to the surface — this happened to me often as a kid, I thought I'd caught a big one like this, but they become all tiny once you bring them back up to the surface. Interiority is like that — you think your thought is deeper than any words, it comes from others, I'm deeper than that — but no, if it comes out flat, it's because that's how it is, your thought, when you rub it against another's, it's not as brilliant as you thought — well yes, you have to get used to it, and it will become brilliant through repeating this kind of experience, which is at first a little painful, but narcissistic wounds are always painful. There you go, exactly. But where Descartes is immense is that this result which he arrives at, in this very first chapter, when he says: what I say completely belies what I aim at — I aim at a singular, I express the general, remember, I aim at this now, the instant that is here right now, and I say 'now,' which I could say at any instant whatsoever — but wait, once he's gone through the piece of wax and all that, he draws an admirable conclusion, it's a relation between language and thought and the real
1:59:46 that's why I'm reading you this as a counterpoint to Hegel's text: 'nevertheless I cannot be too astonished' — once more with force, since this is the seventeenth century, thundering — 'when I consider how much my mind' — that's a word we can all make our own — 'has weakness and a tendency that carries it insensibly into error' — he's as wary as a rat, Descartes, that's his strength, so the weight of the well-known doesn't work with him — 'for although, without speaking' — I keep quiet — 'I consider all this within myself, I think without speaking, the words nevertheless hold me back' — as soon as one wants to say, to express — 'hold me back, and I am almost deceived' — as you were saying — 'by the terms of ordinary language, for we say that we see the same wax if it is presented to us, even now' — that's identity — 'and not that we judge it to be the same' — for he made progress, Descartes, thanks to this little phenomenology I've just traced, which is that we do not see what makes the wax the same, we judge that it is the same, but we judge without seeing — 'for indeed we say that we see the same wax if it is presented to us, and not that we judge it to be the same.'
2:00:56 that it has the same color and the same shape, etc. so I would almost like to conclude that we know the wax by the sight of the eyes — we're back to square one — and not by the mere inspection of the mind, if by chance, happily, it is snatched away from this empiricist temptation — I don't see, fine passage, if I don't see, if I don't look, sorry, out of a window, at men passing in the street, at the sight of whom I don't fail to say that I see men — well yes, I see men in the street, I see men, that's what one says, that's the language of opinion, it's not the language of science, it's knowledge, philosophy — you'll say to me, well what?
2:01:26 I see men, so what? It's not exactly wrong, all the same, that I say I see the wax, and yet what do I see from that admirable window, Descartes, what do I see, let's apply ourselves to seeing, if not — it's famous, you know what follows? — hats and coats, bravo, I'll cut this short in a moment — hats and coats, yes, that I see coats, hats — you know, it's the age of the musketeers, and they're not small hats either, they cover well, and then capes, cloaks, capes and swords, what am I saying? And yet what do I see from that window if not hats and coats which may cover spectres or feigned men who move only by springs — one would say he's twisted, he's paranoid — not at all, he's rigorous, it was the era — not so historic — the era when the first automatons appear, we don't yet have bionic man, virtual man, Spider-Man, I don't know how you managed that better than I did, but the concept is already there, mechanism, Galilean science, that happened, and it's very good, Descartes, that one can make in a mechanical way things that imitate — you even tried to build a chess player, you don't have magic — so what do I see if not covering—
2:02:36 who knows, a machine, let's be wary — which may cover spectres, feigned men who move only by springs, but I judge that they are true men, and thus I understand, by the sole power of judging which resides in my mind, what I believed I saw with my eyes — same result in Descartes as in Hegel, the move that tips from the exteriority of the object into the subject, into interiority — behold, know thyself, it was written at the temple of Delphi, people always came to consult it about external things: am I right to send three ships to Asia Minor now, because I'm trading in oil — that's Heraclitus, yes, he had grown rich from the olive oil trade — am I right to go marry the girl, am I — and the oracle began by saying know thyself, the answer is within you — ah, if Oedipus had understood that, you know he misinterpreted the oracle, he thought the oracle said don't go home, he cleverly outwits the oracle, makes it turn back on him — there, an admirable way for Descartes to stick to things, to be at the immediate, not to chatter outside the thing.
2:03:46 but to let — what I said earlier — not chatter about the thing but restore the speech of the thing itself. Van Gogh used to say we can only make our paintings speak — you know, the artist who says I did that but I wanted to express such and such inside it — if you didn't express it, it's because it's not good; if you say that what you meant to say is even deeper than what you're presenting to us — we came to see your paintings, we didn't come to see your thought — what matters is not what you mean to say, it's what you say, what you express, what you paint, what you compose, what you build if you're an architect, what you produce if you're a filmmaker, etc., and not your loop — leave to philosophers, to ideologues, the wanting-to-do; what you did, own it — looking at your film we'll see what you did. Is the conceptual nonsense?
2:04:32 ah no, no, no, that's rare, no — in art that would be a misunderstanding, I mean the artist, it's a matter of art, within the sphere of art — I insist deliberately on the word — within the sphere of art precisely, the artist doesn't have to produce concepts, doesn't have to write down his intended meaning. The other day I gave the example of the pupil — not an artist, but a bit the same misunderstanding — the pupil who would come and tell the teacher, at the moment of the exam, excuse me if you gave me a bad grade but it's because you judged what I wrote and not what I meant to say — but I swear, what I wrote may not be very good, but what I meant to say was brilliant — yes, yes, but that's where we come back to mediate/immediate, in some way you find it in inter-human, intersubjective relations, and that's where we stand somehow — I would very much like to pass through mediation, through a mediation, so that my infinite and delightful immediacy can be communicated to the other — there, in principio erat verbum, one must still begin with the word — so that's for this mediation, well, I see that you weren't frightened by that little sequence of the now which is already no longer there when it is, etc.
The attributive proposition and non-Euclidean geometries 2:05:42 but once we've grown familiar with it — you know, it's no more difficult than our own form of thought, I mean, if you read Plato's so-called metaphysical dialogues, it's Greek to you — the metaphysical dialogues are the ones after the Republic, the Parmenides, the Sophist, the Philebus — it's a kind of political trap, all these dialogues where nobody gives an inch, it's an enormous difficulty — but what's paradoxical with Hegel is that this difficulty isn't tied to a technical vocabulary. Whereas with Kant you'll find, I don't know, the transcendental I, the apagogic, the ostensive, notions which, once you know them, it's fine — after all he has to give us the definition before using it — whereas with Hegel you see only ordinary words, and yet it's difficult to understand, because it's the attitude that's different, and this attitude is so important, the attitude of following the movement of the thing, whether that thing be a dream or an object or an objective or a proposition or a philosophical system, it doesn't matter — to properly take on the transformation this implies, one must understand that Hegel's contribution—
2:06:53 the most important contribution of Hegel to logic is the transformation of what he calls the attributive proposition into the speculative proposition. Since antiquity the form of the logical proposition, whether in science or philosophy, has been A is B — Socrates is mortal, for example — subject, copula, predicate, subject, predicate, that's it, S P, with between the two something linking them, making them a couple, which is called the copula, here the verb 'to be.' A little friendly piece of advice: if you want to avoid the wanderings tied here to the intrusion of the verb 'to be,' do as mathematicians do, who are the most rigorous on this level: don't say 'is,' say 'belongs to.' Don't say 'the apple is a fruit' — I don't know if the apple has any relation to being, but the apple belongs to the set of fruits — that doesn't seem to make any difference to you, but it avoids all the ontological delirium, and believe me, that's important. Mathematics' strength is that it reasons by extension and not by comprehension as we do most of the time. Let me give a small example, another little scientific detour, but it seems capital to me — when there appeared—
2:08:03 the famous so-called non-Euclidean geometries at the beginning of the 20th century — I remind you that for 20 centuries there was only one geometry, Berenny's, which dominates the whole of classical mathematics — there are immense names in this, Euler, d'Alembert, etc., Cauchy — you know the greatest mathematical schools were French, Russian and Italian — for physics, chemistry it's more Germany, at a certain time anyway — so the Bernoullis, that's a dynasty, the Gophiles, Laplace, Lagrange, etc.
2:08:36 so in Euclidean mathematics it is all in all founded on a first notion, a postulate, therefore undemonstrated like every postulate, but which serves to demonstrate everything else — so watch out: through a point, you know it, it's most famous, one can draw only one parallel to a line in a single plane, and of course for 20 centuries mathematicians strove — they're always irritated when there's something undemonstrated, and they're right, because the best, most powerful theoretical system is the one that, with the minimum of first notions, manages to demonstrate the maximum of derived notions — minimum of primitive notions, maximum of derived notions, that's how you measure the power of a theory — and so if one could, I don't know, like a postulate, but actually one could demonstrate it, let's take advantage of it — well for 20 centuries they exhausted themselves without managing to demonstrate this postulate which did indeed seem to belong to the order of the being of things — there, through a point one cannot draw several, there is only one parallel to a line through a given point. To relaunch the problem of demonstration, a Russian mathematician first, then a German — the Russian Lobachevsky, the German Riemann—
2:09:46 say: let's proceed by absurdity — that means by absurd reasoning — we'll decide to say the opposite: through a point I can draw several, and we'll arrive at a contradiction, which will indirectly prove that Euclid was right — that's proof by contradiction, isn't it. Lobachevsky, the first, decided: through a point, it's arbitrary but not in the real — the Copernican revolution, we are powerful with respect to nature, we are technological ever since we dropped what we believe to be the real, which is only the sensible — we saw its poverty earlier — and turned instead toward the rigor of our definitions. Lobachevsky says: through a point I can draw several, and then he continues to try to reach a contradictory proposition, and he didn't find one — he realized that with this starting point one could construct a perfectly coherent geometry, as coherent as Euclid's, but with a different starting point. Coherent means, precisely, free of contradiction — and remember, there is contradiction only where something has first been said, there is no contradiction in the real. That's where one must distinguish reality and truth — a truth is true or false—
2:10:57 according to someone — sorry, a statement is true or false, excuse me — there is truth only in words, and reality only in things. So there remains the thing which — then Riemann, the German, said, you'll see, it's more and more amusing, it's serious — through a point one can draw none, not one, not several, none — and he too, starting from this starting point, this axiom (we now say axiom rather than postulate in today's mathematics), this axiom could very well have countless statements deduced from it without encountering any contradiction, so that Euclid's mathematics remains valid — remember Newton earlier — but instead of standing as the mathesis universalis, as the last word in mathematics, it now appears only in its truth, that is, as a particular case of a more general mathematics. Science is admirably cumulative, it doesn't throw the false away in the trash to turn toward something else — it's not like fashion, where you go from miniskirts to long dresses and gaiters and then back to miniskirts ten years later — so it's cumulative, I have nothing against fashion, fashion isn't about knowing, so it doesn't bother me — so, interesting.
2:12:08 to see here the power of the human mind — you'll say to me, yes but that's quite amusing, your story, through a point one can draw an infinity, through a point one can draw none — the fact remains that only Euclid's corresponds to the real, because show me several parallels to a line, you can't show it to me — but we don't care, showing it isn't important, you're being empirical, you absolutely want truth to be visible. The strongest thing is that these mathematics, which seem to you like mind games, the non-Euclidean ones, were at the origin of prodigious technological advances, and that none of the modern instruments around you, from television to the mobile phone, not to mention the laser, etc., would have been possible without these mathematical models — which means that the real, and we keep confirming this, is far from what the sensible shows us — one mustn't be mistaken, that is the object of the senses — and Plato was quite right to relegate the sensible to the back of the cave and to inscribe at the entrance of his school that none may enter who is not a geometer. Oh, not that we're going to do math here, we do philosophy, but still, geometry for Plato is an excellent exercise, an excellent propaedeutic for the pupil, so that he is initiated into contemplating things that cannot be touched or seen with the eyes.
2:13:18 is it then touched with the eyes — a point, a line, a straight line or a mathematical circle, you'll tell me all about it. So you will conclude — this will be my conclusion on this chapter — you will conclude with Ionesco's pretty line in The Bald Soprano: take a circle, caress it, it will become vicious. There, the power of abstraction — you see, the more we move away from the sensible, the more we move away in a coherent manner in order to apply ourselves to chaining together true statements — true here meaning non-contradictory — independently of any reference to any exteriority whatsoever, the more I move away from it, the more I practice this theoretical rigor, the more I appropriate the true real — and there you can measure, a bit more clearly, what was said at the beginning: the abyss that separates the mere reality of my sensible experience, empirical reality, from the Wirklichkeit, from effective reality, or effectively real reality, which presupposes a detour and a work. There, do you want it explained? No questions?
Aristotle's definition, dialectical without knowing it 2:14:19 I'll just come back — yes, William, I don't know if you can repeat the sentence I was saying earlier about what you consider the form of health of life, that is, a transformation of the qualifying proposition — ah yes, yes, the attributive proposition, A is B, Socrates is mortal, into the speculative proposition — it's not another statement insofar as it is speculative, but what Hegel reproaches is that the attributive proposition privileges substance — there is a subject, there is what he calls a fixed point, and that is still an abstraction of the understanding, like the piece of wax: the same wax is there, fixed, it doesn't move, the wax identical to itself, and what varies is only its attributes, its epithets, its modes, its color, its size, the sound it emits, etc.
2:15:16 and so the philosopher's task consists simply in shuffling between subject and predicate, or in modifying the predicates, the epithets, the attributes — the sum of what I say about a thing is its predicate, you learn that in elementary school, with Aristotle his pupils first year, the categories — it's not so much that it's grammar first, the attribute, the substance, the mode, etc. — you know, it's an excellent training, the Organon, and Aristotle arrived at the conclusion — I'm answering your question — that there is knowledge only of the general, and existence only of the individual. To know is to classify: among animals, I take those that suckle their young, the mammals; among mammals I take the felines — I'm still not at the individual, I've gone from genus to species to family, and among felines, for me, this gets complicated because the cheetah is a doubtful case — do you know why?
2:16:12 we have doubts as to whether it's really a feline — seriously, because zoology comes to me third-hand, it's a fascination that stays from childhood as with all of us, the child is totemic — the cheetah has no retractile claws, which is characteristic of felines, it has no retractile claws, it looks like one, but well, there are plenty of small specificities, including this one, which make many zoologists hesitate to place it among the felines. And so, let me remind you of the definition of definition — this can serve for all of you who will find yourselves, if I have to start with a definition when in principle one should end with the definition — the definition is when it's written inside, it's when it's finished, terminated, determined — at the beginning it's not very clear, we're going to propose it to show that it's insufficient — so, definition of definition according to Aristotle. Aristotle is the master of all these considerations of method and logic — to define, says Aristotle, is to give the nearest genus plus the specific difference — that has the merit of being precise, so let's clarify, it's very simple: if I want to define man — it's a definition worth what it's worth, one can discuss it—
2:17:22 but at least, at the end of a definition, I say man is an animal — there, I place man in his nearest genus, I don't want to say man is a thing, that's too general, like a planet, like stars — he is an animal, there, I take the nearest genus — which thinks, which reasons, which laughs, in Rabelais it's the fact of laughing that's proper to man, whatever — the specific difference — and here we clearly see what species means, it's an extra precision to bring into the genus. So what's interesting is that this definition is eminently dialectical — I say this behind good old Aristotle's back, I'm not taking a superior stance, but good old Aristotle overwhelms me enormously, it's perhaps the most formidable effort of intelligibility ever produced — but Aristotle didn't like dialecticians — that's his conflict with Plato, dialectics, mathematics, everything abstract, he wasn't too keen on that, I told you earlier, he was tuned in to things, to observable living biology — and yet here he shows just how great a dialectician he is without knowing it, for what has he just said? That to define is to do two contradictory things — first to state—
2:18:32 what is common — man is an animal, seeing what's common to the earthworm, the lion, the fly, whatever you like — and then, conversely, seeing what is unique in the animal kingdom, what makes its specific difference. That's why an exercise in definition is always difficult, because it presupposes a contradictory exercise: first to state the common, then to state the difference. You only get a definition at that price — if you make a definition too general, where there's no specific difference, instead of defining the thing you've drowned it in the vastness where it disappears; if on the contrary you're too specific, the definition will lack extension, as we say in logic. So, coming back to William's question, which is at the heart of the debate — there is a development on this question of the attributive proposition, very interesting and very developed right from the preface — what we've just said can be formally — we're in a preface, we can't do much more — expressed by saying that the nature of the judgment—
The true as subject, not as substance 2:19:42 — or of the proposition in general, a nature which implies within itself the difference of subject and predicate — this is a canette [tin can] — is destroyed by the speculative proposition. Thus the identical proposition that the first proposition becomes contains the counter-blow and the repudiation of this relation of subject and predicate. So what does all that mean? I connect it with Hegel's mistrust of what is the abstract universal — I've insisted enough on that so I won't go back over it, except perhaps to illustrate it where one would least expect it. He was saying, in my view — this is rare, that Hegel sums up his project in a single sentence, I spend my time saying it's this one — the matter, in my view, which will be justified only in the presentation of the system — so it's stated here gratuitously — everything depends on this essential point: being able to grasp and express the true not merely as substance—
2:20:53 it's underlined, substance — but also and precisely as subject. So for Hegel the whole movement of thought consists in going from an immediate relation to the world, which he calls the substantial relation, to the subject — we saw this better with Descartes earlier, how Descartes admirably tipped the unity of the piece of wax from external substantiality to what he himself calls the inspection of my mind, to the subject. Good, at the same time one must note, says Hegel, that substantiality includes within itself the universal, or the immediacy of knowledge itself — and here he gives a little sketch of the history of recent philosophy, recent for his time, in three very Hegelian stages: if the conception of God as sole substance — whose is that?
2:21:45 this — who conceived of God as the sole substance? There's no guarantee, leave all that — substances are everywhere, wherever I say a, a cinder-tray, a book, those are substances, it's the equivalent of the grammatical subject — moreover substare means, in a word, that which stands beneath. You just need to be a speaker of any Indo-European language whatsoever to see that with 'st' we're in what never moves — the service station, isn't it, the statue doesn't stay planted there like a statue, the statue, the state, institutions, stability — everywhere there's static, stat, etc., all these words, thank you, show clearly what belongs to the order of substance, what stands beneath — beneath what?
2:22:33 beneath the attributes, of course — when I say the rose, it is pink, it is faded, it is cheap, it is expensive, on the contrary, all that is epithets that I place on an image, a subject supposed to contain them underneath, the way I put cooking recipe ingredients into a pot — something to hold it all up, the subject, that's it, that's what's underneath, doesn't move. So we saw with Descartes that the white of the wax can become yellow, the cubic shape can become something else, fine — the epithets, the attributes, the predicate move, but fortunately there's substance. Now if I take the word 'subject' now and oppose them in the grammatical sense, it's the same word, for 'subject' comes from 'sub jacere,' a defective Latin verb, and even more defective in French — but that means it's a verb conjugated only on very rare occasions, for certain persons of certain tenses — there are very few tenses, you know it well, jacere, you translate it into French as 'gésir' [to lie]. Where do we still use the verb 'gésir'? 'Ci-gît' [here lies] in cemeteries.
2:23:43 otherwise it doesn't exist — don't try to put it in the past historic, 'tu en kiff,' etc., we can't manage it. So, sub jacere, that which lies beneath — it's exactly the same as subject and substance, the difference is more a matter of convention than etymology, because you see the etymology is the same, what remains beneath — the difference is that we'll rather use 'substance' for things external to us, and 'subject' in the world of speech, of words, of what comes from the subject — hence the grammatical subject. But watch out: by dint of speaking of a thing as if it were a grammatical subject of which we only need to unfold the attributes, we tend to substantialize objects, that is, to privilege in them an identity that supposedly doesn't move, etc. — that's where we go wrong, and the whole history of science consists in ridding us of this substantialist illusion which we've had since the dawn of time and which still grips us, believe me — you just have to look at the delirious talk about race or things like that, that's a drift — sorry, a drift, yes, quite — and then a transformation, I mean, and I would even say an alienating drift—
2:24:53 because what is proper to me, I find it again in another than me — what is proper to me as man, not to me individually, namely unity, the subject, the point, what doesn't vary, the universal — and there, suddenly, I act as if it were immanent, out there, outside me, in grass and in stone, quite simply. So that's the important thing here, this step forward we've taken today — I insist because modern philosophy, in the contemporary sense this time, and we've seen quite well among ourselves how not only non-Hegelian but often, most often, violently anti-Hegelian it is — in particular the thinking that Michel Clouscard captured in the phrase 'liberal-libertarian thought' — this thinking, and even before it, more profoundly, great advances such as psychoanalysis, I'm thinking of Lacan here, like those who drew the philosophical balance sheet of Marxism — there are many names, I don't know, it's very — none for the moment — what is drawing us—
2:26:04 to this level, rightly so — one of the things characterizing modern thought, to use a fairly extensive term — and it's a title of the map, moreover — is that the notion of subject is progressively subverted by the science of the subject-substance, so that I might be dealing with an identical thing — we see more and more the share of accident, of genesis, of temporal processes it took to constitute it. I have a striking example in Racine's preface to Phèdre — he justifies having somewhat transformed the mythological material: the slander, saying 'Hippolytus made advances to me,' he puts it in the mouth of the servant — Racine has the servant suggest to Phèdre: just say it, nobody will doubt your word, you're the queen, he's young, hot-blooded, easy to accuse, so just say he pushed himself on you — whereas in Seneca, from whom he had drawn inspiration, it's Phèdre herself who directly — you know how Racine justifies transforming this — he says I thought that slander, one must say it anyway—
2:27:15 you've seen that I adore Racine, this isn't an aesthetic criticism, but politically it goes far — I thought that slander was an unworthy thing in the mouth of a servant, and that it came fittingly in the mouth of a servant who, by her station, that is her social class, and her station, is more apt for slander, for base sentiments — that's quite extraordinary, it means that at the time one is a slanderer by birth, that's to say, look at the invariant, the substance, the alienation this can produce, it's quite prodigious. You find this again in the national delirium, when people looked for French identity, they looked at hair color, it was delirious, there were even Corsicans trying to fit into French identity, what a joke. I'd like — more to conclude than to relaunch something, but to introduce, I hope, the next session, where I imagine we'll still tackle the great concepts — well, we've already tackled them, but fundamental ones — so, to start from what has just been said, from substance, from its accidents, starting from Aristotle, passing through Descartes who takes up the same categories, and there—
2:28:26 I was just about to get to that — so obviously there's a word that hasn't been said much but which is very important, which is determination — for sure, which is a way of saying otherwise, following Spinoza for example, which Hegel is not going to let pass, obviously, negation, and therefore determination as negativity, the double negation — so there we have the starting point, we start there next time, the confirmation, so there, we're going to begin — it's straight along the line of what I'm ending with, since we've clearly seen the problem of the transformation of the thing into the subject, of generality into particularity, of the inconsistency of sense-certainties, etc. — so that brings us to determinations — we already touched on it without knowing it when I spoke earlier of the hypothesis that I was born with yellow glasses and nobody tells me, I tend to take the yellow for a substance because I don't know it comes from the subject. There, we'll start there next time, next week: determination, negation, and therefore double negation, at the heart of Hegelianism. Thank you, Dominique. Thank you all, and thank you all, thank you all.
