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Program: the Berlin Aesthetics and the Phenomenology 0:26 So then, an announcement anyway - by popular demand, we noticed there was still one Thursday left. It's the month of August with five Thursdays. There will be a fifth Thursday, so a fifth lesson, since it was announced that it would be every Thursday of August, next week. There we go, Dominique, over to you. Here we go. Once again, a thousand thanks for being here, for your loyalty, and thanks to the newcomer too, all the more so. Since this is our second-to-last session of this month of August of Hegel at the beach, I'll take the opportunity to let you know that for the final session, next Thursday, I will tackle the most concrete aspects of the late Hegel through what he tells us about aesthetics, which in number of pages is undoubtedly his most substantial work, and which he wrote in the last years of his life in Berlin.
1:27 That's part of the lecture courses. We need to clearly distinguish the works published by Hegel, under his own supervision, with the usual back-and-forth between an author and his publisher, for which he can be held fully responsible. And what is called Hegel's Aesthetics is in fact his students' notes - well of course, the most diligent ones, his Prussian students, whom he could trust. It was well recorded. And it's by making a kind of digest, what today we'd call a compilation, of the different notes taken by his students, that what is called Hegel's Aesthetics was published, and of which he himself says - some even say this was a precaution regarding Prussian censorship - that these are just tracking notes, but that the essential matter is said orally in his lectures, where censorship, well, let's say, where speech is in action, so to speak.
2:19 And saying that all the details, the concrete things, he had to say in lectures, live, and leaving out of prudence in his writings only things of such complexity that I feel sorry for the poor censors - I imagine the minister of Censors sent by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, because Hegel came under, good morning madam, Hegel came under the Ministry of Religious Affairs, his department of national education, you see, the religious authorities were nonetheless very vigilant regarding anything that was the spread of so-called French ideas at the time, you can imagine, in particular the Enlightenment - so despite all that, one sees clearly the edifice, and especially when one knows the rest of his work, how consistent Hegel's lectures on aesthetics are.
3:03 So, we'll finish with aesthetics next Thursday, but let's not forget that this whole little summer seminar, this little August chat, is centered around the Phenomenology - so that sounds a bit complicated, it's much simpler than one thinks - it's through the Berlin Aesthetics, which, insofar as it is once again lecture notes, is therefore relatively clearer, because of its didactic and pedagogical aim, than works like the Phenomenology or the Logic, all the more so, that we will come back to see what Hegel says about aesthetics in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Let's not forget that this is the first work in which his system takes shape in an almost definitive way, with these great articulations, and so it would be interesting to see in a much denser and more developed way, with all the mediations that are absent from the lecture courses precisely, what it says in the Phenomenology.
The abstract will and the fury of destruction 3:58 So that's for next time - we'll look next time at the whole set of advances in Hegelian thought through a specific prism, that of the gaze he casts on aesthetics. That's the program for next Thursday. And so, the last session. As for... Good morning, Madam. Good morning, Sir. As for today, we're going to start from something we established last time, something particularly important for understanding the whole set of themes specific to Hegel's thought - through our little discussion of the 'now,' you know, when we got into the heart of the text, the very first chapter of the Phenomenology, sense-certainty, we saw for the first time dialectic live, so to speak, and outside of introductions and prefaces, and we obtained a first result, made a first illustration, a first modeling, as one would say today, of a concept that plays a decisive role in the whole of Hegelian thought, and in which, one could say, the specific contribution of Hegel is concentrated - I mean here, to go quickly, and to be precise, what is called the negation of the negation,
5:09 or double negation, as we see it, and which has given rise to many discussions since. Here we should be, if not solemn, at least mark the occasion, as we say in French, insofar as I'm telling you this is a decisive, essential, fundamental concept - but we've talked together enough to know that with Hegel, that doesn't mean much, 'a fundamental principle, an absolute principle,' etc. He is the first to say that a fundamental principle of any thought whatsoever is always a betrayal of it, because what is fundamental is the simple, the elementary - what matters is the development of that basic principle, and the richness of its unfolding, which alone gives it its concrete, and therefore true, character. These are reminders of Hegelian fundamentals.
5:51 So, if I nonetheless make an exception for the negation of the negation, it's not to betray Hegel - we'll illustrate it through very concrete examples - but still, for the solemnity of the thing, so to speak, I'll read you a short text where he speaks of it, in one of the Berlin works, in the Philosophy of Right, a work I've often quoted to you, and the passage I'm going to read you follows on from another one, which I've read to you three times, and which I'm taking up for a fourth time, but this time continuing on to the part that's important for today, which I haven't read to you yet, and which will bring us to this famous concept of the negation of the negation.
6:31 You surely remember my character drawn from Rimbaud's Illuminations, that prince who embodies what Hegel calls abstract self-consciousness, desire in its empty abstraction, and who is so empty that as soon as he wants to satisfy himself, he becomes a fury of destruction toward reality. So I'll take up again the way we illustrated this point of view in the text I've quoted three times, and I'll remind you nonetheless that in this passage, when Hegel shows this point of view of the abstract self, of the self that has not yet introduced negation within itself, that takes itself for the only positivity, the opposite of the negative, and that therefore has a negative attitude toward everything positive outside itself, he says this - remember, I've already quoted it but I'll continue on from there - it is the freedom of the void.
7:30 It can manifest itself in a real form and become a passion. So, if it remains merely theoretical, it is the religious fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation. If it turns toward action, it is, in politics as in religion, the fanaticism of the destruction of all existing order and the excommunication of any individual suspected of wanting an order, and the annihilation of any organization seeking to emerge. There is almost an anticipation of the horrors of our century here. I'm thinking in particular of the greatest genocide of the postwar period, that of the Khmers - I'm telling you this because, by a quirk of my biography, I was born in Vietnam.
8:04 and you know that it's not for the sake of the personal individual, it's for the small amount of universality that it may contain, in any case, for what's relevant here to what Hegel says. The illustration is quite striking. As a child I was surrounded by people - the conservatives, the colonials, the collaborators, the Japanese, as there were, the pied-noirs, the Germans, the Pétainists, it'll be the same idea to know all this. And who often said, comparing, you know, they love talking about genes, about races, these people, 'the Vietnamese is like this, the Cambodian is like that.'
8:35 So the Vietnamese, he's a hard worker, that's true, but he doesn't like us, he's nationalistic, he's touchy. Whereas the Cambodian, he's kind, he's gentle, he's Buddhist. A million dead. When Hegel says, you see, that the point of view of pure contemplation turns into a fury of destruction, it's still striking as a power of anticipation. There you go. And I had stopped there. No, I'll finish this paragraph that I've already read. It thinks it wants a positive state, for example, the state of universal equality or of universal religious life.
9:06 So one might think he's being ironic about the partisans of universal equality. No. But in fact, it doesn't want any positive reality at all. For that would immediately introduce some order or other. I gave the example of taxes last time. Well, yes. A determination, as well as a particular determination of institutions - whereas it is precisely by negating these specifications and these objective determinations that this negative freedom becomes conscious of itself. Thus what it believes it wants, it trusts its good conscience.
9:38 You know, human-rightism, as they say, these are sincere people. Thus what it believes it wants can be, for itself, only an abstract representation, and its realization nothing but a fury of destruction. I quote - a fury of destruction. So here's the continuation that I haven't read to you. It's exactly the antithesis. Let me just remind you that in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel is talking about all this because he is dealing with the will, in order to arrive afterward at the legal person - the will, and the first determination of the will was the one I just read to you, the abstract will - I won't say more about it, we've developed it enough.
Character, then individuality as synthesis 10:10 Antithesis. At the same time, and not afterward, at the same time, the self is a passage from undifferentiated indeterminacy, which we just saw, to differentiation, delimitation, and the positing of a specified determination. You see, we're not going to take more sharply drawn positions than that. Which becomes the character of a content and an object. So here we have, opposed to the will - let's say romantic, abstract to go quickly - which recognizes itself in nothing around it, which thus becomes an unhappy consciousness, as Hegel says.
10:41 It is, on the contrary, a matter of - let's take as an example the miser, Molière's Miser. What appears as character. We've all learned the importance of characters in classical theater. And moreover, what defines classicism in general, and French literary classicism in particular, is precisely this powerful unity of characters. The modern hero is a character characterized by his lack of fixed outline. I'm thinking of that admirable title you know - even if one hasn't read the book, one knows the title - by Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
11:14 There's modern man. Man without... Mann ohne Eigenschaft. It's the same word in German - that's profound for Hegel, who says 'quality,' meaning what specifies a thing - hard, soft, quality and property. For Hegel, it's what is one's own at the same time, what is proper to a thing. Quality is what the quality of lead is, namely that it melts at such a temperature, etc. That's part of its properties. The two words are linked as well in scientific French. So there you have it, the modern hero is rather one who finds himself nowhere, truly, in a fixed determination.
11:48 And in contrast, so I come back now to our antithesis, I took the example of Harpagon over there, or of someone who devotes himself entirely to a character trait. But it could especially be the hero, the great tragic hero of Greek tragedy. As we saw that Antigone is wholly within family piety, within fidelity to the unwritten law, to the law of blood, as Creon is wholly devoted to the law of the city, manifest and decided in the light of day - you have to keep these representations in mind.
12:21 Let me repeat, this is going to become more concrete. At the same time, the self is a passage from undifferentiated indeterminacy to differentiation, delimitation, and the positing of a specified determination that becomes the character of a content and an object. This content can moreover be given by nature - it's very elliptical, this work he did at the end of his life, he hadn't approved anything of it - by nature, or else produced from the concept of spirit, that is, in Hegelian terms, of history. So, this content, then - someone who is pathologically jealous, who is entirely within the character trait of jealousy, or of avarice, or of misanthropy, like poor Alceste in Molière, or of fidelity like Andromache in Racine, this is precisely what gives a content to what is called here the character.
13:14 Through this affirmation of oneself as determined - the reverse position from the modern self - the self enters into existence in general. This is interesting, what Hegel says here. It means there is perhaps a more archaic side, more primitive than the modern self, insofar as there is a well-defined outline to which one is bound - the father, the patriarch - but the roles are clearly distributed and delimited. But on the other hand, there is something more courageous about it. The self enters into existence in general. It doesn't just sit there constantly withdrawing from external determinations.
13:47 It is the absolute moment - just as the first was also absolute in its determination - it is the absolute moment of the finite and the particular in the self. And if I'm reading this passage to you again today, and if I'm continuing on from it, it's because we're going to arrive at our famous negation of the negation, you'll see. He adds a remark to what I just read. This second element of determination - the one that consists in investing oneself in a character, in a finitude - is just as much negation and abolition as the first. It is the abolition of the first abstract negativity.
14:18 So we learn that giving oneself a character, devoting oneself wholly, in a heroic way, to a feeling, to a substantial element, and entering into existence, presupposes that one has emerged from primitive indeterminacy. It is an abolition, so we have negated it. It is the abolition of the first abstract negativity. The first element, indeed - you see this back and forth, so we're coming back to the modern self - the first element, indeed, as first for-itself, is not true infinity or the concrete universal.
14:50 We saw that what it lacked was its abstraction - on the contrary. That is, it's a concept, but only something determined, one-sided. Since it wants to be the abstraction of every determination, it is therefore not itself without determination. Remember that he who desires believes he is superior to the object he is making disappear, but in fact, since the object keeps renewing itself, he ends up proving that he depends on the object even though he wanted to suppress it, and he ends up affirming the object when he wanted to affirm himself. This comes back to that dialectic, I think it's well understood between us.
15:23 So, I repeat, it is therefore not itself without determination, and its abstract and one-sided being constitutes its specified determination, its inadequacy, its finitude. By wanting to be infinite and separate from everything finite, it ends up with the finite outside itself, and that's what determines it. Now, up to this point, and Hegel is going to add a small detail, he's going to tell us that up to this point, this isn't a great advance - in any case, it's an advance already achieved before him by modern philosophy. Look: the separation and determination of the two elements indicated, the abstract self and the self that engages in the concrete, are found in the philosophy of Fichte, as well as in that of Kant.
15:58 To stick with Fichte, more relevant for Hegel than Kant's philosophy - the self as unlimited is taken merely as positive, and this is what Hegel reproaches him for: the self is a thing like that, positive, this abstract self, and Fichte doesn't see its negativity in it, so much so that this abstract self must be the true one, and consequently, limitation always appears to it as added from outside. And here Hegel adds this sentence that shows the importance of the concept I'm getting to. To conceive of immanent negativity in the universal or in the identical, as in the self, negativity in the self.
16:32 You know, it's said that modern thought is a thought that has subverted the notion of the subject. You see how relevant Hegel still is. When Rimbaud says 'I is an other,' we're not far from that here. To conceive of immanent negativity in the universal or in the identical, as in the self, was the progress - here he's giving himself a bit of a pat on the back - was the progress that speculative philosophy still had to make, a necessity that those who, like Fichte, don't perceive the dualism of the finite and the infinite within the self, don't suspect.
17:02 That seems abstract, but you see that the stakes are very concrete. So, let me continue. The will, which was his starting point, is the unity of these two moments. So: thesis, the abstract self, the destructive self, the fury of destruction. Antithesis, the self as character, which posits itself with a determination in the external world - I will be a musketeer, and I will defend my honor against the first one who flinches, and I'll challenge him to a duel. Synthesis, the unity of these two moments - what does that mean? It is particularity, so we come back to number two, the particular, not the abstract self.
17:38 It is particularity reflected upon itself and thereby raised to the universal, that is, individuality. Now this is dense, we need to pause a bit here. Let me repeat the sentence. The will, the unity of these two moments, colon, is particularity reflected on itself and thereby elevated to the universal, that is, individuality. Once we have a clear definition, an unequivocal predicate of what the individual is for Hegel, we'll take advantage of it - as we've often done. The dominant thinking absolutely wants to make Hegel into a totalitarian who disregards the individual, and it obviously confuses here the individual and the particular.
18:17 Hegel is reminding us here that the individual must not be opposed to the universal. This is all the more relevant now that the notion of the universal has been discredited over the last 40 years - the '40 shameful years,' to borrow a title I've often cited by Michel Clouscard. You know, everything is relative, this is the dominant culturalism, such and such a value, such and such a society becomes a counter-value in another one, truth on this side of the Pyrenees and error beyond. I recall that Montesquieu had already - Hegel admired him greatly - shown that this was rather lazy thinking, and that it was normal that the law shouldn't be the same on either side of the Pyrenees.
18:53 Because if, for example, in a dry country, arson is punished more severely than in a humid one, it's because there is reason within the laws. That's all of Montesquieu's work, to have shown that men are not entirely foolish. 'When I set out to examine men, guided solely by their fancy...' So, generally, the individual is opposed to the universal, and here comes Hegel saying that the true universal, like the true individual, is one that starts from its own particularity, as we all do.
19:29 We all have a family, national, regional constellation. We all have particular determinations from the outset. But the fact that we are human beings - which is the difference with an ashtray or with a chicken - is that we can reflect, meaning not holding our heads in our hands, that has nothing to do with it, but taking a step back, putting up a mirror - reflection - we always gain by recalling the proper meaning of abstract terms.
19:59 To reflect is first of all to place a thing before a mirror, and facing this thing, there is its reflection - that's the literal meaning. And so, the fact that the particular can reflect itself is what gradually raises it to universality. And it is when it makes this effort to reflect on its particularity, when it becomes conscious of its determinations - remember Spinoza's phrase that Hegel takes up for himself - true freedom is the understanding of necessity.
20:29 It's when I understand - instead of having endless discussions between partisans of determinism, saying everything is determined, we can't change anything, and those who are partisans, in a somewhat voluntaristic mode, of freedom against determinism, like Sartre for example, which is rather heroic on his part, but well, it's also a bit naive - he was wary, in psychoanalysis, of what could rightly seem like an excuse for freedom in the notion of the unconscious. 'Ah, I did that, it's not me, it's my unconscious.' A caricature.
20:59 And this way of affirming freedom somewhat voluntaristically, a bit like an ought-to-be here. Whereas for Spinoza as for Hegel, true freedom is not one that is opposed to determination - I won't go back over it, we've seen enough of the abstract self - but which, on the contrary, becomes conscious of the determinations at work upon it and thereby frees itself from them. So, the self-determination of the self consists in positing itself in a state which is the negation of the self.
Free determination: freedom as liberation 21:29 You see, we're getting to the negation. Since to determine is to bound and to remain, and to remain oneself - that is, in one's identity with oneself and in one's universality - in order to be linked only to oneself in determination. The self determines itself insofar as it is a relation of negativity to itself, and it is the very character of this relation that renders it indifferent to this specified determination. He wants to show that this is a free determination since it is the self that freely invests itself in it. I can't help but think here of Rousseau, who does this magnificently somewhere in Emile - and I'll take the opportunity to announce that we've already had occasion to note that we're lucky this year to be celebrating the tercentenary of Rousseau's birth, which was on the 28th of June last - so this whole jubilee year, so to speak - there will be, on the 19th of September, right here, a small debate on Rousseau's work and thought, with speakers I recommend in advance, since Barbara de Negroni, who produced an admirable small critical edition
22:39 of the two concrete applications of the Social Contract - the draft constitution for Corsica and the draft constitution for Poland - and his Discourse on Political Economy, very topical, the three works in a single volume from Garnier Flammarion - so Madame de Negroni will be there, as well as Vargas, the philosopher Vargas, who was a collaborator of Althusser's and who will come present a quite different point of view, an unpublished text by Althusser written in '72 on Rousseau. So there, let me get back to the point - if I refer to Rousseau here, it's for quite another reason, concerning this famous free determination, you see, this synthesis, this equals determination which is free because I placed myself there, and not because nature or God placed me there - there, I couldn't do anything. In Rousseau's Emile you have a passage I've already quoted, but for another reason, about the tool - where the narrator, so to speak, the one who expresses Rousseau's thought, has just convinced the mother of his pupil, who belongs to the aristocracy of the time, to have her son learn a manual trade - so at one point there's dismay, because not only does the nobility not work, doesn't even engage in trade, but on top of that
23:49 manual work, moreover Rousseau specifies, 'I want a trade that makes the hands work more than the head; I don't want him to be a musician nor a maker of books; I want him to be a carpenter' - well, you see, it's bluntly manual in the most prosaic sense of the term, not in the sense, as a pretext, of taking up artistic trades - no. 'And a trade for my son - my son, a craftsman, you think!' 'I think better than you do, Madam, who never wanted to make him anything but a marquis, a lord, a prince, and perhaps one day less than nothing' - one would never have dared speak like that 60 years before the great year 1814, and one senses that royalty is already quite shaken. And he says: 'Let people admire as much as they like this defeated king who wants to bury himself beneath the wreckage of his throne' - let's say Sardanapalus - 'as for me, I despise him; I see that he is king only by his crown' - my determination is royalty, that's quite something after all - 'but he who loses it and does without it is then above it,' says Rousseau, 'above the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, a madman can fill as well as another, he rises to the state of man' - the great texts of Rousseau - there are more irritating bits in Rousseau, but here we have peaks - the great texts of Rousseau are summits.
24:59 'which a madman can fill as well as another' - not all kings are wicked - 'they rise to the state of man' - you see the extraordinary stylistic antithesis Rousseau makes: descending from the rank of king, rising to the state of man, 'which so few men know how to fulfill.' So there's the crown - the one who loses it and does without it, that's not serious, it's not serious that I have a determination, it's not serious that I am - excuse me, for those in the region - a Breton fond of the bottle, or a Corsican, I'll take this one, a lazy Corsican, that's not serious - what matters is to become aware of it and to make do with it, and above all not to be bound to it. What is terrible in Harpagon - I come back to my example of character, of The Miser - is that he wants to die the instant he has lost his essential determination, that is, his strongbox - yes, his strongbox - there, that's where you see the meaning of alienation, he had completely alienated himself in his possessions, and literally so, such that when he loses it, he loses himself. Well seen, and this isn't a legend - it's not just Molière's caricaturing genius - remember, it's very topical - during the Great Crisis, the Great Depression of the '30s, those bankers who threw themselves from the 30th floor - you'd have to be an idiot to kill yourself because you went bankrupt - I know it's tied
26:09 to a determination, honor - it's still idiotic, you realize, it has happened to me, I hope, like some good people here, to have debts, etc. - you can't kill yourself because you owe money to the BNP, sorry for the shortcut - it's not an endorsement - it's an encouragement to the Greek people, here we are talking about illegitimate debts - you can't at the same time sell them, I'm thinking of the Germans here, the largest defense budget in the European Union per capita, and then complain that they live like grasshoppers after having cashed in the bill. So this is an important advance, this text, I think, because once again it puts things on entirely new grounds by bringing in negation - the traditional discussion still often heard nowadays at the level of public opinion, between: are we determined or are we free? I don't know - at the outset we are determined, and the effort we make to free ourselves from that, that is true freedom - it's the path that leads from determination to freedom - this path is called liberation - freedom is not something already given, it's not a quality, it's the act by which one emancipates oneself from it.
27:20 So the self determines itself insofar as it is a relation of negativity to itself, and it is the very character of this relation that renders it indifferent to this specified determination - meaning, as with Rousseau, he who loses it and does without it knows that it is his own and ideal, not real - he conceives of it as a pure virtuality by which he is not bound, but in which he finds himself only because he has placed himself there. Such is the freedom of the will which constitutes its concept or its substance, its weight, as weight constitutes the substance of bodies. You remember I drew a parallel last time, following that fine phrase of Kant's, paying this tribute to Rousseau, this beautiful tribute to Rousseau, that Rousseau is the Newton of morality - that's not entirely by chance, these aren't just grandiose phrases, they're precise phrases - it means that freedom plays, in the moral world, in the broad sense of course, the role that gravity plays - and that's no small thing - in the physical world, ask any physicist, he's tearing his hair out trying to figure out now whether there are particles of gravitation, gravitons. So there you have it, freedom is the substance, the weight of the will, as weight constitutes the substance of bodies. I haven't forgotten about negation - on the contrary, I'm getting right to the heart of it.
28:31 He makes a small remark here, Hegel - when it gets a bit abstract, he makes a remark - it's even often been said that he relegated the concrete to the remarks in his later works - and this remark is going to be useful to us because it revises a little bit everything we've just said, and it brings the final determination we were missing about negation. Negation: each consciousness conceives of itself as universal, as the possibility of abstracting itself from all content, and as particular, as - sorry, from all content - and each consciousness, on the other hand - the antithesis - considers itself as particular, with a certain object, a certain content, a certain aim. Yet these two moments are only abstractions - here you see the dialectician, he sends both of them packing together - the concrete and the true, he says, in parentheses, all that is true and concrete are the universal which has the particular as its opposite, but a particular which, through its reflection into itself, has come into accord with the universal, which has recognized, so to speak, that its position was also found in the other - has come into accord with the universal. This unity is individuality, not in its immediacy as a unity - that would be the particular - we say in French 'le quidam,' precisely.
29:41 You know that quid is neuter in Latin, it means some individual or other, it's more powerful than that; this unity is individuality not in its immediacy as a unity but according to its very concept. The first two moments are easily agreed upon and conceived, everyone can easily think abstract freedom as its opposite, character, because taken each on its own they are abstract moments without truth. But the third, the true one, the one that makes the synthesis, the particular that reflects itself upon itself and thereby attains the universal — so the individual, the third, the true, the speculative — and the true insofar as conceived can only be thought speculatively is what the understanding always refuses to penetrate. And again a swipe at the abstract understanding, which always sees contradictions but is incapable of operating their synthesis, incapable, as reason does, of rising above the understanding and making the synthesis. So this third moment is what the understanding always refuses to penetrate, the understanding which precisely always calls the concept inconceivable, and it speaks of demonstration and discussion.
30:51 And that's the solemn heart of the speculative, the infinite as negativity relating to itself, this ultimate source of all activity, all life and all consciousness — that's rather rare in Hegel, it belongs to logic as purely speculative philosophy, meaning he won't develop it here, he only recalls it. One can only note here that when one says the will is universal, the will determines itself, one expresses the will as subject or as an already presupposed substrate, but it is not something finished before determination and before the suppression and idealization of that determination. So you see the importance of this concrete universal concept and of negation — negation, I've asked you for an effort of abstraction, I apologize, it's a rather dense text, and not so as to rest, but to illustrate it too, it's rather restful in itself anyway. I'm going to try to embody it in a text, in a domain that Hegel was the first to integrate into properly philosophical inquiry.
The tool, existing rational middle term 32:02 It's the theme of what is called today political economy, to put it broadly. Before Marx, Hegel was the first to have understood the decisive aspect — once he had understood the importance of history and of historical determinations on every individual consciousness, he took a close interest, the very first among philosophers, in properly economic determinations, and he wrote a commentary when he was young in Jena — a commentary that has unfortunately been lost — on the principles of economics of Steuart, the Englishman who situated himself roughly between Smith and Ricardo. So Hegel had studied the first so-called classical economics, and I quote you a text from 1805, so two years before the Phenomenology, at the moment when the system was being put together, in which — this is moving because it's the first time — we witness the appearance of the tool, the most prosaic thing possible, the tool as productive force, one might say, using a Marxist term, taking up a spade or a plough, or equally
33:12 a particle accelerator — we always remain within the sphere of means, in conceptual terms. And Hegel, in his youthful texts, is drawing up the balance sheet — I'm giving you the context of his reflection to help you understand the transition from what he still calls, in Schellingian language at the time, the three powers of spirit — powers a bit like roots, like what is potential but not yet in act. And these three powers, according to him — the list is easy to state — are, in chronological order, memory, language, and the tool. And there's a great novelty in philosophy here: memory, language — people had already noticed before Hegel, in philosophy, that these had a certain importance in the emergence of thought, but the tool — what's that doing here? It's a crude thing, isn't it, what's it doing in the domain of spirit? Well, excuse me, there it is — so memory, language, I skip ahead, and all of a sudden he arrives at what he calls — well, the text says the instrument, that's one translation, one can also say the tool, no matter — and he says this:
34:25 "Animal desire is a state of animal consciousness in which the act of annihilating is refracted, and in which the members of the opposition are posited solely as having to be suppressed" — excuse me, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, the instrument — we had seen, hadn't we, that immediate desire ended up affirming the omnipotence of the object, so we've already read this in the terminology, I'll say it quickly here: desire, in its act of annihilating, does not manage to obtain its own satisfaction, and the objective being, even as it is annihilated, nevertheless continues to subsist. Labor is this practical consciousness — we're going to move to concrete things — insofar as it is the relation of universal beings, and the one being of the two extremes — labor will come to occupy the position of the middle term, since he speaks of extremes, as in a syllogism there are two extremes and a middle term, the bearer of essence, as they said in Aristotle: among all men
35:35 are mortal, and Socrates is a man — one must pass through "Socrates is mortal," one must pass through "Socrates is a man," which is the middle term, the bearer of essence. So here we have two extremes, the worker and the worked object, and between the two, the instrument — that's what we're going to talk about, the middle term. And he says this: the instrument — sorry, labor — must likewise be the middle term to which the two extremes relate as opposed, and in which they subsist as separated, and through which the act of laboring as such has its permanent existence. And that's what we're going to dig into: the instrument is the existing rational middle term — that's what Hegel understood, and it's new, he's the first to integrate it into philosophy. It's not a middle term in the head, in thought, as I just showed with the example from Aristotle, with the example of Socrates — it's not a middle term between ideas, it's not a mediating thought, it's in reality: the tool produces a middle term between nature and me. The instrument is the existing rational middle term, the existing universality, and not the universality in my head. Within the practical process it appears on the side of what is active as opposed to what is passive, but then — as against — I don't know if I'm currently
36:45 working stones — if I'm a road-mender, the instrument appears active in relation to what is passive, the stone, but it is itself passive with respect to the worker, to the one who wields it. It is truly the middle term, it is that in which labor has its permanence. There Hegel was struck — well yes, the worker disappears in the process of labor, he wears himself out in fatigue, the object disappears in the process of labor, the stone will become a lintel for a window or for a house or for a door, but what subsists is the tool. And anthropologists know this, even those who have never read Hegel and do not do philosophy — they articulate how the great stages, the great periods of anthropology, chipped stone, polished stone, bronze, iron — these are indeed decisive stages defined by the tool. And why?
37:35 Because the child of Homo sapiens already has all the acquisitions from birth, he doesn't have to start everything from zero — thanks to tools he already has the acquisitions of hundreds of billions of years of Neanderthal evolution. So we don't start from zero — biologically, you know, each fetus starts biological evolution over from zero, but on the other hand when it comes out into the world it doesn't start from zero, because history is already there. Thanks to the tool, the tool has been able to render present what would otherwise have remained — as Hegel often criticizes in Kant and in philosophies of subjectivity — an ought-to-be, the house of my dreams remains a hollow ought-to-be, a chimera, if you like, as long as it stays in my head. It's only once it's realized — you need masons, you need contractors, yes, I open a small parenthesis so as not to upset anyone, I mean to build a bridge you need both a worker and an engineer, you can do without one or the other, you can build a bridge with workers and no engineer, but it risks falling down, you can build a bridge with an engineer and no workers, it stays on paper, it never exists — you need both.
Labor negates natural negation and creates a world 38:45 There you have, to end concretely, the importance of the tool, which thus allows man to finally have a historical existence, a properly human existence, an existence by which — excuse me — he escapes from purely natural determinations. And the labor man exercises — the concrete labor, there is material labor that man exercises upon nature, the transformation, the transformation he exercises upon natural being-there, we're speaking precisely — is by definition a negation of that being-there, but this negation is opposed to a negation that was already there, that of nature. Remember: I have to eat in order to live; if I let nature take its course, it is nature that eliminates me. The animal stays at that stage — that's why some existentialists used to say, it was fashionable in the fifties, that the animal merely subsists, whereas man exists, attains existence, precisely because he emerges from that pure continuity of external determination — nature in the form of illness. I've taught a good deal in Africa, you'll tell me
39:56 that I never miss an opportunity to take a swipe at ecology — no, at ecologism, believe me, I'm in favor, I think our environment could be much better than it is, that's not the question, but I'm wary of the naturalism that creeps into ecologism. Believe me, this is a body speaking to you — when you have to break stones to grow wheat, that's hard work, you don't go on holiday every day. In Normandy people say Corsicans are lazy — yes, yes, they're clever, Rousseau praised laziness precisely by showing that it's a form of rebellion — they're fools who are too often taken advantage of by foreigners, I don't buy into that, don't worry, I'm not indulging in Corsican stereotypes. So it's important to see that this negation performed by human technicity with regard to nature is a second-degree negation, which itself comes to suppress a negation that is already there, nature's own. I told you that when I was a teacher in Africa I had devastating gaps, holes appearing in my classes every school year, because the school year begins right after the rainy season, because of malaria — the greatest cause of death in the world, the number one cause of death worldwide.
41:06 More than anything, more than cancer — it's malaria, more than AIDS, more than road accidents, more than suicides, transmitted by a mosquito — organic, I guarantee you, organic in any case, natural, that's true. So nature eliminates us if we let it. So it is when man asserts himself and creates a new world — or rather, not a new world, when man creates a world, because before that there was the earth. The world is a very elaborate notion — you'll hear it spoken of first in theology, I'm speaking seriously here — Rimbaud said theology is serious, heaven really is up above, that's Rimbaud speaking, and hell really is down below. You know, in — starting from Holy Thursday, I believe, in the Gospel of John that part is more developed than in the others — Jesus says: the prince of this world is coming, but he is already defeated. Evil is defined as the prince of this world, for as for me, it's well known, my kingdom is not of this world. There is indeed an opposition, in Christianity, isn't there, between supramundane values — that's why Hegel says that Christianity is a logic of essence and not of being, as with the Greeks — it's a passage from being to essence, which has suppressed itself
42:16 into the invisible, the Deus absconditus, isn't it, the hidden God, to speak as the Jansenists do. So the world — because there are often slippages of meaning in everyday discussions, people say that industry is polluting the world — no, the universe, trust it, I mean the constellations of stars around us whose light reaches us across billions of kilometers — that must make the stars laugh when people think man is polluting nature. Nature is immense, man is beginning to pollute an infinitesimal part of his most immediate environment. You'll tell me, that's the one we live in — ah yes, I quite agree, but then, pursuing the reasoning, let's do a negation of the negation — if it's the one we live in, then we're quite right to take care of it, because it's the one we live in, and it will be a long time before we go and live in another galaxy. If it's because we live in it that I quite agree we should maintain this environment and be watchful and take care of it, then it is because man is a value, not nature — we have completely reversed the initial point of view. And then, yes, then I'm in favor of caring for the environment, and I'm in favor of making it a vigilant, and not merely repressive, police, but in order to protect man,
43:27 not nature, I don't know. Whatever we do, we could set off five hundred nuclear wars, nature doesn't care — there are nuclear explosions in the matter of stars worth about ten billion times that of Hiroshima, you know, there. So I insist a great deal here: the world created by man — man created the world, and before that there was the earth. When the Gospel says the prince of this world is coming and that he is defeated, and — you find this in French too, when we say, "oh, I'm going out into the world tonight," there's a little connotation — it's not just a connotation, it's rather fitting to say so — in the notion of world, where we see clearly that it's an intersubjective relation, if I may say so, it's relations between men that make a world a world, and the world — I don't know, say the Pygmy hunters' world is not the same as the world of a Versailles courtier, etc., these are worlds. So the world that man created, from the moment he takes on existence, he enters into existence through tool-making, by interposing a middle term between nature and himself — this middle term is the world in which we live.
44:37 is a second negation with respect to natural negation — I'll dwell a bit more on this point, you see it's concrete, so it's worth illustrating. Think of Robinson Crusoe, the original version, I'm not talking about Tournier's version, Defoe's version, which is a work slightly earlier than the Phenomenology of Spirit, late eighteenth century — the English, who at the time were the world's foremost travelers with a fleet, by far have the best authors on this point. Take Robinson — you'll tell me, no, he's not living in a historical and technical world, I could be in the heart of the Sahara or the heart of the Amazon, or like Robinson on his island, in immediate contact, not mediated by tools, with nature. The first hundred pages of Robinson, what are they?
45:21 They are Robinson's exhausting efforts to go and fetch, from the wreck of the ship that cast him onto the island, everything he can scrape together despite his fatigue, everything he can bring back to his cabin — of what? Of the highest level of the historical technology of the time, English technology: a sextant, a compass, a calendar. Well yes, we are not in nature, and even if I didn't have all that, the very fact that I think means I have learned language — believe me, words don't grow on trees. There, I wanted to make this point to show that this concept of negation of the negation, despite its abstract formulation, is extremely concrete. So, after the passage on the 'now' with which we ended last time, we're now going to illustrate this activity of negation when it is exercised no longer upon things, as was the case up to now, in the order of desire, of immediate consumption for example, but when negation is exercised upon the other — this is of course the famous passage on the struggle of self-consciousnesses in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
Self-consciousness exists only as recognized 46:31 within which you find the passage that is most often quoted, and which had so fascinated the young Marx, isn't it — this dialectic of master and slave. So I quote you the first sentence of this chapter, which is called "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness," subtitled "Lordship and Bondage," and before reading you this first sentence, I can't help — I see no reason to hold back, since it's very much in keeping with what follows — pointing to an eighteenth-century text that is the first to show that this master-servant relation is decisive in human relations, throughout their whole history, even as it emancipates itself from it, but that it is decisive at the outset in the very constitution of anthropology, if I may say so. I'm thinking again of Rousseau, in the third letter to Malesherbes — Malesherbes was the decent fellow who wanted to serve as an interface, we'd say intermediary today, between Rousseau and the Encyclopedists, with whom Rousseau's complicated character had caused a falling-out — and so he wrote to Rousseau, saying:
47:41 try to express yourself, people don't understand you, you're making yourself look bad — what do you find in nature, people don't understand, we're quite well off with a fine fireplace, Louis XV rugs — what do you find in the forest? It was so new that it wasn't obvious at the time. And Rousseau recounts a bit of the daily life of his stay at the Hermitage, in response to Malesherbes's request, and speaks of a moment when he arrives in the forest after leaving the little house where he was sheltering with his desk, and after a passage where he sounds like the worst of misanthropes: "My first wish was that neither letter nor visit should come to disturb the charm; I put off all that to other cares" — everything, that is, relating to others, I set it aside, it's a source of anxiety, he's a hunted man — "but once I had managed to get past a certain corner, with what a thrill of joy I would walk on with a more tranquil step, saying to myself: here I am, master of myself for the rest of this day" — mastery and bondage begin here, but here I am master of myself — "and there I sought" — I'll skip some passages — "a wild spot in the forest where I thought I had penetrated first, and where nothing showing the hand of man announced"
48:51 servitude and domination — exactly the two themes, the two terms that are at stake here. Rousseau is the first to have shown that what he flees is not society — Rousseau is a lover of man, indeed, when you read him, a trembling lover of man — but simply what he rejects is this society where servitude and domination reign; he's not pointing to this or that society, there are unfortunately plenty in which that pair is on display. So this reminder is to show you that this is truly the affair of the age that is germinating, with Rousseau, thirty years before the French Revolution, and with Hegel some ten years later. And here is the first sentence: "Self-consciousness is in itself and for itself when, and by the fact that, it is in itself and for itself for another self-consciousness" — that's pure Hegel. So let me reassure you, because the gloss comes right away — "that is, it exists only in being recognized." Well, there it is, it had to be said right away — that's what it means to be in itself and for itself for another self-consciousness, because the other recognizes me too, there it is.
50:01 So self-consciousness was indeed for itself when it desired objects — it believed itself to be so, but it disappeared, so to speak, into its desiring attitude — we saw enough of this with the figure of Rimbaud. For it to be not only for itself but in itself, it must be seen as such by another self-consciousness, because the other self-consciousness will not let itself be devoured, will not let itself be consumed, will not let itself be negated, as the object was earlier, by the other self-consciousness. You remember, in Rimbaud's text, the object, so to speak, since it's a matter of courtesans, then of handsome beasts etc., I remember well, "and he even hurled himself upon the crowd and cut it to pieces," isn't it, I remind you that in Rimbaud the object doesn't resist the fury of destruction, it was somewhat the fatality of the poor prince, whereas here we are equal to equal. "The concept of this unity of self-consciousness in its doubling is the concept of infinity." So for self-consciousness there is another self-consciousness — oh dear, and I thought I was the truth, the rest being the objects I dominate — and here's the other self-consciousness that also wants to play the little boss. I say, oh, that's the way
51:11 I do it — it presents itself, a man whom she believed — I had a rival, so they say, precisely because I adore — it's the "whom she believed" — well yes, as soon as we pass into the real, there are objective determinations. We would like to be alone, but here's a lovely passage from Nerval where he sinks into a kind of reverie, coming back from the theater in the worldliness of Paris, sighing in his bed, in that Nervalian state par excellence, the one Rousseau had inaugurated, which is neither waking nor sleep but between the two, reverie: "and sunk in my bed I found no more rest, I was plunged into a half-slumber" — that's precise, good writers, a half-slumber is a quarter of sleep if you calculate — "plunged into a half-slumber, all my youth passed again in my memories — this state in which the mind still resists the strange combinations of dream often allows one to see, crowded into a few instants, the most striking scenes of a long period of life" — that's very well observed about sleep — and then he says, "I am going to picture to myself a château of the time of Henri IV, with its pointed roofs covered in slate" — that's his childhood in the Valois, clearly — "and its reddish face, notched at the corners with yellowed stones, a great green square framed with elms and lime trees, and I was the only boy"
52:21 in this round dance, where I had brought my companion, still very young, Sylvie — well, of course, the dream does all sorts of things, I'm the only man surrounded by young girls — well yes, that's the dream, let's return to reality: there is another self-consciousness that believed her — ah, that won't do — I spoke of Robinson earlier, you don't see the connection? I'm alone on my island, and then all of a sudden — you know, a very beautiful passage, actually — when he sees a trace of bare feet on the beach — ah, someone else! And what's the first relation that gets established? Ah, you're my brother, I felt bad, I felt lonely, that's good, we'll share the cooking — not at all, Friday becomes Robinson's slave, mastery and servitude, a great Robinson text. I don't know if it illustrates how one behaves on a desert island, but in any case it expresses well the contradictions at work in the England of the time — it's a Robinsonade, Marx would say, it's magnificent. So for self-consciousness there is another self-consciousness; it presents itself to it as coming from outside; in this sense the other self-consciousness is an object — I don't take it as a subject, only I am subject at the outset. This has a double meaning: self-consciousness has lost itself, for it finds itself as being
53:31 another essence; it has thereby suppressed the other, for it does not see the other either as essence, but it is itself that it sees in the other. One understands why Lacan, who invited Hyppolite, who translated this text, to his seminar at the École normale supérieure, was fascinated by these passages of Hegel — all the developments, for those of you interested, and I know some of you are, very much so, and rightly so, in this field, the field of the Freudian unconscious, see the importance of the imaginary relation to the other, it's the mirror relation, I believe — I think I have to do with the other, but it's not the true Other, big O, it's the little o other, it's the other who is a mirage in which I present myself. As we saw very clearly in Rimbaud's text, where at the end he stumbles upon his double, so to speak. So this has a double meaning: self-consciousness has lost itself, it has thereby suppressed the other, for it does not see the other as essence equal to itself either — understood — but it is itself that it sees in the other; it must suppress this other being of its own, it's the absolute rival, since I see it as if it were me. A little friendly advice: when you suffer from jealousy, I advise you to avoid the natural tendency at that point, which is to imagine the rival as oneself,
54:41 because we suffer all the more when he's an idiot — yes, this applies to men as much as to women — for once it's a purely imaginary relation. So beforehand, of course, she deceives me since she does with him all that she did with me — well no, the other is not me. Good thing there's the other! It must suppress this other being of its own — that's the suppression of the first double meaning — it must set about suppressing the other independent essence in order thereby to acquire the certainty of itself as essence. And we saw last time that in Hegel the word "certainty" is always opposed to — excuse me, I'm the teacher, I want to know if we've followed properly, we're among friends, that's not the point — well, you haven't followed: certainty, yes, it's not because we have a certainty that we hold the truth, there's a long road leading from certainty to truth. You had taken the example of the motionless earth, didn't you, which was a certainty for centuries — there's a long way from the motionless earth to the truth. Certainty is only the subjective aspect, it's not thought yet. So for now it must suppress
55:52 this other of its own — that's the suppression of the first double meaning — and it has the certainty of being the essence and that the other is inessential. This movement of self-consciousness in its relation with another self-consciousness has been represented in this way, as the action of one of the self-consciousnesses; but this action of the one has itself this double meaning, that it is equally its own action and the action of the other — the other does the same thing. If we are invited to some social gathering, you and I, and we arrive a little late because of you, since you're a woman — a woman isn't late, she's been delayed — my singular determinations and my character come out. I told you about my singular determinations. We arrive, I say to you, please, go ahead, and he'll say to me, please, after you — you see, I'm with a gentleman, he'll say, please, after you — we're going to have a little struggle for recognition, each wanting to show he's no more of an animal than the other. Well yes, and at table I say to you, help yourself first — help yourself first. Have you ever seen a dog say to another, help yourself first, old boy? Even the most adorable of little dogs growls even when its mistress approaches its bowl sometimes — that happens, you don't see
57:02 a dog take a step back and say, no, no, I can restrain my desire, I am a being of culture, I want to be recognized as someone who, unlike the animal, can take a distance from nature. So, help yourself first, old boy — ah, no, no, you first — this can go on for a long time. Yes, that's precisely why these rules of politeness, extremely elaborate in every culture, are at stake here. In Africa it's out of the question for a young child to look his father in the eye when speaking to him — he looks down at the ground, and one never says to someone "you're an idiot" in Africa, one says to a third party, "tell him he's an idiot," in front of the other — one must avoid violence, all of this is admirably coded, human life would not be possible without it, all of this consists of muted struggles for recognition. But what we have just seen with Hegel, with what he calls the double action, is that the other does the same thing. Well yes, I no longer have to do with an object but with an object that is a subject — well yes, one has to get used to it, oh dear, he's onto me too. Lacan also worked a great deal on this, on the game — the word "jeu," starting from the game of odd and even in "The Purloined Letter," since he makes quite a few allusions to the game of odd and even in the Purloined Letter — Lacan takes the opportunity to say: look at the little game people play, guessing which hand — you know, in which hand, generally the novice
58:12 when you play with a child, if the object is in this hand, my right hand, the next time he'll say it's in the left hand, because the child first works with crude differences; when he's a bit more clever, he'll show the same hand again, but the other makes the same reasoning, he thinks I'm going to put it in the same hand, in the other hand, so I'll leave it in the same one — so it all cancels out, all these determinations, it's terrible, the other, because the other is another self — that's the problem. Generally the same and the other are opposed; Plato spent his whole life, didn't he, trying to understand that the other had to be integrated into the same — great dialectician, to his great regret, but that's what shows he's a great mind, he takes it upon himself. But here self-consciousness has to do not with an object but with another self-consciousness that performs the same operations. I'll finish with one more little illustration, quite comic. When I was studying philosophy we had sequences of general psychology, and we went either to Sainte-Anne to do observations, or those who had chosen psychopathology went there, or we went to see rats in mazes — experimental psychology, let's move on — and there was one rat that made me laugh enormously, when
59:22 he was excited around females, whose scent was passed into his cage, the poor wretch, and when the scent of other males in rut was passed to him, it completely inhibited his libido — I found that sweet. Ah well, that's fine, others will take charge, the species is assured. So the scent of the other, of the rival, inhibits — there, a little comic aside. So there, in this experiment — well, if there weren't death, of course, and what makes the great difference between human consciousness and animal consciousness, if you want to understand — this isn't to have great tremors in the voice — it's often been said that Hegel was a pantragism, a panlogism, whereas, I think I mentioned this last time, he laughed with pleasure listening to The Barber of Seville, and wrote to his wife from Vienna — it's only at the end of his life that he travels — I'm almost ashamed to say it, but I almost preferred The Barber of Seville, or Figaro, he adored what was light and joyful. He writes to the wife of his best friend:
The two vehicles before the abyss: knowing that one will die 1:00:32 we should go to the ball, there's nothing interesting left but balls in our sad age — that's not exactly a tragic attitude, but let's set Hegel aside. He's saying that man has passed through the tragic — it's the animal that knows it's going to die, roughly speaking, to put it simply. And to understand the stakes, I ask you to think of an image I'm building for you, if you will: imagine two vehicles driving on two parallel roads, in convoy as they say in the navy, in the same direction, and imagine that these two roads arrive at the same abyss, a cliff. Of the two drivers, one doesn't know there's an abyss, the other does. Which of the two is going to brake, do you think? There's no reason for the one who doesn't know to brake — he is what is admirably called in French — this applies rather well to the animal in normal times — a happy fool, meaning a precarious happiness. Hegel worked a great deal on the text of Genesis in the Bible, on the earthly paradise,
1:01:42 felix culpa, happy fault, because there are those who still believe we were really in paradise. In fact, if you look closely, before the fault, in the text — I'm not interpreting, I'm only recalling what you all know — in paradise one does not work — you see the direct connection with the tool, the text on the tool I just quoted — since it's after the fault that you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, but before that it hung from the trees. Before the fault we are naked — you remember, in the text, when God calls Adam after the fault: "I hid myself because I am naked" — ah, you're ashamed of being naked, so you tasted the fruit — and we see right away, because before, he had no notion of good and evil. It's the serpent who says to Eve: if you taste this fruit you will be like God, scientes bonum et malum, knowing good and evil — the devil doesn't always lie, he's right, knowledge — the tree of knowledge, especially this knowledge, not knowledge of the number of grains of sand in the Sahara, not indifferent knowledge, but the important knowledge of wisdom — you know what it is to know
1:02:52 good and evil — there he's not lying, the liar — it's a parable of the liar. But felix culpa says, in fact, it's the passage from animality to humanity that this admirable text of Genesis sanctions, quite simply — what is someone who doesn't work, who is entirely naked? It's the animal. So the one who knows there's the abyss is going to brake — but what does braking mean, because we can't spin out the metaphor indefinitely, we have to be serious and concrete — brake on what? What's the engine in my story? Well, it's precisely desires — what brings me closer, not to death, because when I think about that, it doesn't change much, but what makes me suddenly think of finitude? Well, it's the moment I have the anxiety of desire. The fetus in its mother's womb has no consciousness of time, precisely because as soon as it has the slightest desire it's fulfilled by admirable exchanges I'm no specialist in, but I'll say — it's not like that, it's not in the tragic, in lack, waiting — well, that's rather — afterward, it's not under the weight, it has no effort to make to stand up, etc., etc.
1:04:00 So you understand now — this is Hegel's whole approach, trying to find a meaning for human behaviors as they are, and not to lecture man on how he ought to be. That's the great originality, understand — again, philosophies of being and not of ought-to-be. In the Philosophy of Right he will go on, with a bit of aggression, against those who always want to reform everything — "to conceive what is" is the task of reason, he says — this manual, because it's his political testament, does not consist in giving lessons to the state as everyone does today — it's Hegel who's doing it, today, in 1807 — but this manual consists in understanding how one must think the state that is, whether one likes it or not is another matter. It's exactly what Marx did — the writer of Capital — how the world we live in functions, and not, here's the world I'd like to put in its place — you won't find that in Marx, here's how the world we live in functions; if that pleases you, so much the better for you, if it doesn't please you, by knowing it you'll see how to free yourself from it. So, braking, for the car that knows there's the abyss, means, in every culture, beginning to take some distance from my desire,
1:05:10 because if I stick to the logic of animal desire, I'll head to my death at full speed. So, help yourself first — you see how that suddenly regains its meaning — go ahead, please, after you. And more seriously, here it's Lent before Easter, elsewhere it will be Ramadan, fasting, the Buddhist — no matter, each culture has its specificity, but each culture has its own way of affirming what I call braking, restraining, as we say in French, immediate desire — not because it would be evil, etc., but because it's the instance that animalizes us. That doesn't mean desire is bad — above all not, in this sense — against a meaning, we're not moralizing here, but this allows us to give meaning to behaviors that sometimes seem absurd or seem like errors — they are not errors, the things that exist are rational, they have a reason for being, whether they please us or not. So it's the example of the two vehicles, I hold to it, and I'm going to illustrate it with a passage taken from a poem by Hölderlin — I'm getting old, I always have a reference, I'm sorry, one thinks it's only roses when one grows old, but since these aren't texts widely read, it lets me balance out France Culture a bit.
1:06:22 But yes, I thought of France Culture the other day, because I allowed myself to open my book to make a quotation, but it wasn't to quote myself, it was to quote Rimbaud — you'll tell me, but I hope you've all understood that this whole seminar only serves to promote my book. But still, that would be — I'll continue my parenthesis on France Culture, I'm quite serious — there was a time, and I pay tribute to France Culture for that era, when it was admirable to have at one's disposal truly excellent authors, excellent specialists — it could just as well be about the egg-laying of the female crocodile, I mean, not only in literature but in philosophy, in science, and in reflection on current events, in politics — there were excellent authors invited, and journalists of great merit, and interviewees — that seems rather old now, that era, compared to what's happening now, which I'm criticizing. It's not that I'm allowing myself to make such a long — this is a long parenthesis, and that's how it works — and at Éditions Delga, my publisher, there's a book that came out on the France Culture scandal that I recommend to you — it corresponds, I won't make an ad hominem argument, but roughly, to the era of Madame Adler,
1:07:32 where it's the publishers and the producers of the product themselves who go straight onto the radio to do the show and promote the latest releases, etc., all while maintaining an appearance of objective literary discussion — that's rather scandalous in a way, it's become promotion, advertising promotion, promotional discourse where there used to be cultural discourse. There, I close the parenthesis I was only half joking about when I said all this is to promote my book — if I carried on like that I'd be right up there with the France Culture scandal-makers. So let me quote you this passage, which will illustrate what I'm saying about the two cars racing toward the abyss, you'll see — sorry, such a poem, I'm going to try to quote it from memory, I'm going to try to quote it from memory, I find it, for he says this, in this passage there: for they cannot do everything,
1:08:43 he's speaking of the gods — ah, he says, they cannot do everything, the immortals — usually he speaks of them with tremors in his voice, with his admiration for the Greek world, the gods, the divine, etc. — but mortals, that is us, reach the abyss before them. You see, that's close to my image, the abyss — likewise with them — that is, with us, with you, with them — the echo changes, for time is long, but the true comes at last, they draw very near. Hegel, late Hegel, speaks somewhat of the history of patience and of the labor of the concept, for those who are too impatient, and Hölderlin says: they cannot do everything — I'll read it straight through — for the masters of heaven do not have full power. Yes, mortals reach the edge of the abyss before them; thus the echo changes with them; time is long, but here comes the true appearing. So once again, all these behaviors of distance with respect to natural being are effects of the second negation, and when this negation upon self-consciousness
Struggle to the death and war: death, absolute master 1:09:54 to return to our text on mastery and servitude — the problem is that the other does the same, and the relation to death — that's why I've made this long parenthesis — is decisive here. Each wants to show he is above death, because if I show that death is the most important thing, that it's what frightens me most, I don't distinguish myself from the animal, so I don't prove to the other that I am a human being — hence valor and heroism in combat, since the heroic ages, it's the case to say, as much as alpinists who go seeking that extreme, that's a way of it. Yes, the primary risk is to show that there are values for me that are — we all know that if our child is in the flames of a fire we will rush in without paying attention to whether it burns our clothes or whatever, we'll go get him. There are values above death — above, I say this because there are those who believe they've found, at the base of every human being, the principle of survival, as with nature — no, there are more important things than the principle of survival, like the resistance fighter who dies without giving up his comrades, there are more important things than the principle of survival, I remind you. So, to present oneself as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing oneself as pure negation
1:11:04 of one's objective mode of being, or consists in showing that one is attached to no determinate being-there — I will show the other that I am not attached to my comfort nor to anything, that I am ready to sacrifice everything to show that I am free and above these natural determinations, isn't that so — it consists in showing that one is not attached to any determinate being-there, nor to the singularity of being-there in general, in showing that one is not attached to life. This presentation is the double action, since each does it — this isn't just about the combatants — action of the other and action upon oneself and by oneself, insofar as it is the other's action, each thus tends toward the death of the other — that's the combat — but in this the second action is also present, the action upon oneself and by oneself, for the first action implies risking one's own life. The behavior of the two self-consciousnesses is thus determined such that each proves itself — you see, each to itself and to the other, double proof — sorry, it proves itself and one to the other by means of the struggle for life and death — it proves itself, no need for another direct object complement, they must necessarily engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for themselves — continue my sentence — to the truth.
1:12:16 It's a pair of terms — when you hear "certainty" you have to know, we're at the first degree, certainty is in my head, but reality hasn't followed suit yet, so I must impose it on reality, and then it will be truth. The behavior of the two self-consciousnesses is thus determined such that each proves itself and one to the other by means of the struggle for life and death; they must necessarily engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being-for-self to the truth, in the other and in themselves. It is only by risking one's life that — it is only by risking one's life that one preserves freedom. I say this because at the time people speak of métro, boulot, dodo, we have often lost, in modern society, the sense of death — although it may be, relaunching my car image, that we're perhaps closer now — since wars are fortunately less frequent — we're still closest to death through illness, and death is still there, it's not a problem, it's still there. But this is an important sentence of Hegel's: it is only at the risk of one's life that freedom becomes a value. And here I read you a passage from the Phenomenology where Hegel, speaking of the Greek world, when he analyzes
1:13:26 tragedy — we had seen the world of day, man, Creon, politics, the world; and the world of night, woman, Antigone, the family, the unwritten and hidden laws, the laws of blood — and how the relation is organized between the two, between the public instance, the city if you like, and all the particularities trying to make their place within it, the families, the household gods as they were called then. And there's this astonishing text that takes up again the importance of death for preserving — Hegel says — freedom: the community can thus, on the one hand, can — not can, must — the community must organize itself in the systems of personal independence, there's the particular, of property, of personal right, of real right; likewise, on the other hand, the modes of labor can articulate themselves and become independent in their own associations, for ends that are at first singular — the carpenter, the one who makes pots in Greece, the one who trades — olive oil, Heraclitus with Asia Minor — one admits, one tolerates the modes of labor
1:14:38 for ends that are at first singular, where each projects only his personal interest, those of acquisition and enjoyment — why not, the spirit of universal association — this recalls, however, the simplicity and negative essence of these systems in the process of isolating themselves. So there is a haunting fear on the part of public power that, encrusted in this acquisition for ends at first singular — the subject can be a personal or collective subject, a family, a clan, no matter, a clientele as economics so aptly puts it — it risks forgetting the universal. Well, so as not to let them take root and harden in this isolation — so as not to let the whole disintegrate and the spirit evaporate — you see the Hegelian concepts at work here — the government must — there it's more "peut" [can], it's Muss, I know the German text, it's not the finger of morality, it's not the finger of Soll, of ought-to-be, "I must not steal my little brother's candy," no, no, no, Muss, it's the Muss, Es muss sein — sorry, madam, muss sein, that means, "it must be so," in German, Es muss sein, which is what was found on the score of Beethoven's last quartet — absolutely.
1:15:48 where we see three little notes, ta-pam-pam, muss sein, es muss sein — it's a little pun that Beethoven made on his score, of course, but it's because he's inspired by Beethoven — must this be, this must be, it's Muss, it's really serious, it's the will, not mere velleity. So the government must, excuse me, so as not to take root and harden into this isolation, so as not to let the whole disintegrate and let the spirit evaporate into all these little privatizations that are taking place, the government must from time to time shake them in their intimacy. This is the text on the Greeks by war — I should say Greece is not for war, we are not dealing with morality here, he's trying to understand the meaning of what is, the meaning, why the hero has this prestige — in Aeschylus's Persians, for example, he is a bit fragile, having confronted the fear of death on the battlefield. So it must from time to time shake them in their intimacy through war, it must disturb their order which becomes habitual — equally against order, interesting, he's not against order, but when order becomes habitual you have to be careful, it becomes a crust. Péguy is not a thinker of my persuasion, he's a thinker who is truly
1:16:58 in some respects reactionary, Christian, and who supported the war of 1914 — but an admirable, immense poet: 'the church is dead wood, it's habituated wood' — it's magnificent. Through war it must disturb the order that becomes habitual, violate their right to independence, just as with individuals who, sinking into this order, detach themselves from the whole and aspire to inviolable being-for-itself and to personal security. The government, in this imposed labor, must give them a feeling of their master — and there's the word that ends this paragraph — death. And we've noted that in Hegel death plays the role — it's the only concept that cannot be dialecticized, since it calls forth the absolute master. Now in general the master is always relative — master-slave, we'll see this later, the slave in emancipating himself becomes master of the master — but here there is a master who is the absolute master: death. Through this dissolution of the form of subsistence, spirit represses — represses the engulfment in natural being-there, far from ethical being-there — it preserves the self of consciousness and raises it into freedom and into its strength. Negative essence shows itself as the power
1:18:08 proper to the community, and as the force of its own preservation. The community thus finds its truth and the reinforcement of its power — it which was the world, the community is the world of day, you remember, where one votes in the agora in full manifestness. The community thus finds its truth and the reinforcement of its power — oh surprise — in the essence of divine law and in the subterranean kingdom, death. It's magnificent, this dialectic. There, I wanted to quote this passage from the theology of logic, extremely concrete, and Hyppolite says in a note that it's a strikingly Hegelian passage, if I may say so. I return to our two consciousnesses in the process of confronting each other. They must necessarily engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being-for-itself to truth in the other and in themselves. It is only through risking one's life that freedom is preserved, that one proves that the essence of self-consciousness is not being, is not the immediate mode in which self-consciousness first arises — we have all arisen like little reacting animals, haven't we, or the essential thing for us at that moment, our needs, not even desires — is not the immediate mode in which self-consciousness
Master, slave, enjoyment, and the slave as master of the master 1:19:19 first arises, is not its sinking into the expanse of life. Rather, one proves through this risk — the risk that the hero takes — that in self-consciousness there is nothing present that is not for it a vanishing moment; so I can sacrifice it, meaning, isn't it, vanishing — one proves that it is only pure being-for-itself. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person in the legal sense — the individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition, he may well have the certainty, he is not truly a person, he has not attained the truth of this recognition as the recognition of an independent self-consciousness. I think of a people like the Vietnamese people, who proved in the face of two immense powers — France first and its allies afterward — that in order to be, to subsist in their independence, they had to fight to be recognized as such. Likewise — I speak of Vietnam by contrast, for example, with the countries of sub-Saharan Africa where independence was granted by referendum by the metropolitan power — and look at the differences this makes afterward between a granted independence and one conquered through hard struggle.
1:20:29 The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as the recognition of an independent self-consciousness. Likewise each individual must aim at the death of the other in staking his own life, for the other is worth no more to him than he is to himself — it's not a moral duty, you understand — its essence appears to it as an other, it is outside itself and must supersede its being-there outside itself. The other is a consciousness encumbered in various ways, living in the element of being; but it must intuit its otherness as pure being-for-itself, as absolute negation. But this supreme proof, by means of death, precisely supersedes the very truth that was supposed to come from it, and at the same time supersedes the certainty of self in general. For just as life is the natural position of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of this same consciousness, negation without independence, negation which therefore remains deprived of the sought-for meaning of recognition — for all this is a struggle for recognition. So the master — let's look more closely now at the two characters, in the theatrical sense, the two figures that appear: the master and the slave. The master is the consciousness that is for itself, and no longer merely the concept of this consciousness
1:21:39 before the fight he was the concept, but now we've gone into combat, I put my sword to my opponent's throat, he had the choice between living, but in servitude, or dying in combat — he chose to live, so he is my slave — and it is a consciousness being-for-itself which is now in relation with itself through the mediation of another consciousness, a consciousness to whose essence it belongs to be synthesized with independent being, or with thinghood in general. The slave deals with thinghood in general, it's he who mops the floor, who shapes things, and from the moment the master-slave relation is established in this pairing, it's through the mediation of the other, in this case the slave, that the master now has a relation to the real — 'bring me the ashtray,' I say this because I saw in Africa people calling a servant boy who was 80 meters away to bring back an ashtray that was one meter away, that's why I think of this example. The master relates in these two moments to a thing as such — the object of desire, the master has desires, but the more powerful a master he is, the more desires he has — the master relates in these two moments to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to a consciousness for which thinghood is the essential. The master is, first, as concept of self-consciousness
1:22:49 an immediate relation of being-for-itself, but at the same time he is, second, mediation, or a being-for-itself that is for itself only through the intermediary of another — you're beginning to guess that this other, the slave who seemed to have the secondary, passive role, is taking on more and more importance, it's through him now that everything passes, my relation to things and to what I want will pass through the action of another. The master is therefore, and at the same time he is as mediation, or as a being-for-itself that is for itself only through the intermediary — mediation and no longer immediately, as it is in my thought, as in my certainty — of another who thus relates immediately, or the moment. The master relates mediately to the slave through the intermediary of independent being, for this is what binds the slave, this is his chain from which he cannot abstract himself in combat, and this is why he showed himself dependent, having his independence in thinghood — I wanted to prefer things, it will be a thing — but the master is the power that dominates this being, for he showed in combat that this being was worth for him only as a thing. He's speaking of material being, life, survival — that this being was worth for him only as a negative thing that cannot be above
1:23:59 what — the master being the power that dominates this being, this being being the power that dominates the other individual — in this syllogism the master subsumes thereby that other individual. Likewise the master relates mediately to the thing through the intermediary of the slave. The slave, as self-consciousness in general, behaves negatively toward the thing and supersedes it — the dirt in the household, I supersede it — but it is at the same time independent for him, so he cannot, through his act of negating, get the better of the thing and annihilate it; the slave transforms it, then, only through his labor — it's underlined, he transforms it through his labor. Conversely, through this mediation, the immediate relation becomes for the master the pure negation of this same thing, that is, enjoyment — and the master becomes like Rimbaud's prince, he becomes pure enjoyment with no more obstacle resisting him, unlike the peasant who, to eat, must first plow — matter no longer resists, and we see that the master is in danger, superb dialectic. Conversely, through this mediation, the immediate relation becomes for the master the pure negation of this same thing, or enjoyment — what is not achieved by desire is achieved by the master's enjoyment, finishing with the thing, satisfaction in enjoyment
1:25:09 We hear again the paraphrase of Rimbaud's tale, don't we — this is not achieved through desire because of the independence of the thing, but the master, who has interposed the slave between the thing and himself, thereby relates only to the dependence of the thing, and purely enjoys it. In these two moments, for the master, his recognition through another consciousness becomes effective — it's the same thing in torture, in the principle of torture — is it there? — the principle there — in the phenomenon of torture there's also an element of enjoyment for the one who tortures — of torture — I'm talking about torture of torture?
1:25:42 There's a form of torture, yes? I'm not talking about torture of torture, you mean there's an enjoyment in the one who makes the other suffer? Yes, absolutely, in the sadist anyway, yes, that's it. There's an aphorism by Novalis, who is an exact contemporary of Hegel, another equally nocturnal moment — it's terrible, this thing was written in German, well, I'm not afraid of anything — he says in an aphorism, it's strange that the true root of cruelty is voluptuousness. In these two moments this consciousness cannot master being and attain absolute negation, and so here present is this moment of recognition in which the other consciousness supersedes itself as being-for-itself and thus itself does what the first does to it — we witness a reversal. It seems abstract but to illustrate it all the same, what is coming to light is that the master has a relation to the world that is increasingly vanishing, vanishing into the evanescence of enjoyment, whereas the slave, for the first time, insofar as he lives in a world that does not belong to him but which he shapes, as Hegel says, which shapes him, rediscovers his own activity in the form of the objects surrounding him. The slave finds himself recognized by the outer world, which is more in balance
1:26:52 with the outer world. And Hegel had given a very good image, he said: take a child alone by a river who, to relieve his boredom, throws stones into the water and is fascinated by the rings that spread out — he says you already have there the key to our relation to art and aesthetics. There's a kind of satisfaction for the child who suddenly sees a world that is indifferent to him, that doesn't usually pay attention to him, returning to him the echo of his own activity — it's a very, very beautiful passage, of course, as if suddenly nature, indifferent to man, gave back to him, for once, the image of his mastery — to the child, a little mastery in the sense we see here. However, for recognition in the proper sense of the term, one moment is still missing: that in which the master does to himself what he does to the other individual, and that in which the slave does to the master what he does to himself. So it has arisen only from a one-sided and unequal recognition — yes, the slave has proved to be master of the master, it's through him that everything passes. You have a striking illustration of this emancipation of the slave through skill, especially when he becomes a craftsman in the next stage
1:28:02 it's in a film that some of you may have seen, by Joseph Losey, called The Servant — admirably filmed too, it's not my specialty but I'm sure Dominique Mazoui would confirm that it's a well-filmed film, he knows more about it than I do about camerawork — and the pitch of the story, roughly, is a young lion as they say, a young man of the British establishment — a world even more caste-bound than the other one, that of the English Restoration — who of course has his valet with the yellow stripes, his valet who is truly the perfect British valet, very courteous, impeccable, and who has a relationship — sometimes he gets bored — a relationship at times so intimate with his valet that he becomes a bit of a buddy, and the valet gains more and more ascendancy over his master, and at a certain point they quarrel, the master clearly sees he's starting to take on importance, he dismisses him — up to that point nothing very particular — and then after two days the master can't take it anymore, he goes down to the carpet, he helps out, and then he comes back, he says come back — the master has become dependent, when there's the strike
1:29:13 of garbage collection — there's a garbage strike, elsewhere it's not so bad, people used to picking up their own trash aren't bothered by it, but when you're used to having the sanitation department do it for you, it's terrible, you find yourself crippled from having handed off all the thankless tasks to someone other than yourself. The day he refuses to work, that's when you see the strength of the strike, its original meaning, its power — because you'll tell me that what's said about the master's slave, he never really saw it the same way since it's just a slave, whatever, where to go, the freedom of slaves is potential but it's enormous. As Rousseau said, force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them. There have been slaves by nature — how does he put it exactly, he quotes Aristotle who says there are men born to command, men born to obey — that's an archaic conception of birth, like that, some have a servile mentality, a master mentality, the race of lords, you see where that can lead — and Rousseau comments, he says Aristotle was right but he mistook the effect for the cause, he takes everything really backwards, he says every man born into slavery is born a slave, that's certain, and he says men lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape them — you see how that connects
Rational and real: the universal is intersubjective 1:30:23 force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them — the slave does not realize how powerful he is. And when Marx ends a famous text with 'workers of all countries, unite,' it's not a slogan, it's the strongest point, and it's an old theme, you know — and here I'll pay homage to someone to whom Hegel himself pays homage in his last important political book, Elements of the Philosophy of Right — in the preface, he pays a magnificent homage to Plato, in a rather somber passage, the passage with that well-known citation about the owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk, a passage where he speaks like an old man about the pretension of changing the world: we note here that philosophy always comes too late, like the owl of Minerva, it takes flight at nightfall, it completes its work when the world has already accomplished its transformation, it cannot rejuvenate it — gray on gray. It's a somewhat somber, grayish passage, but it ends very well, I refer you to reading the passage — and at a certain point he pays homage to Plato and says, to show that one must understand what is, and not tell the state what it ought to be, but understand the state that is around us, the reality that surrounds us, he says that's what Plato did in his Republic — it seems surprising
1:31:33 because the Republic is even the very symbol of utopia par excellence — Plato's Republic, that's it, the ideal state as it should be made, it's the complete opposite of something Hegelian, it's the ought-to-be and not — yes, that's the superficial reading, that's perhaps even how Plato envisioned it himself, but when you look at his text you see clearly that he's expressing the problems that were current in his time, that is, his era appeared as what Hegel calls, and which will of course flourish in Christianity, which is the era that begins right after this collapse, free infinite subjectivity, which twenty centuries later will give the modern romantic subject, all of us, the one who is free, infinite. You remember we spoke last time about the Parthenon, which caps with a quite horizontal pediment the hubris of the columns that want to rise toward the sky, whereas the cathedral, or the minaret, or the spire of transcendence goes as high as it can go. It seems that at Beauvais — which has the highest vault in all of Christendom, the highest spire is at Ulm in Germany, the highest vault is Beauvais — it seems that Beauvais was even higher at the end of the 12th century, and a bit too high, because it collapsed. You see the hubris, the Tower of Babel, what had to happen happened, it collapsed — during Easter mass I believe, I don't know — so now it's been 10 meters lower ever since, it's monitored
1:32:43 with vibration sensors, unfortunately. And so this dimension of free infinite subjectivity, which is not at all characteristic of the Greek world but is something already present, at the time when Plato is writing — for philosophy comes when it's too late — Socrates, Plato and his pupil Aristotle teach when Philip, Philip of Macedon, is busy making short work of Greece bit by bit, we're passing from the city to the empire, from what Hegel calls, for the Greek world, aesthetic religion, to the empire of abstract right, from the citizen to the Roman person — but let's not wander off there, we'll see it next time with aesthetics. So he pays homage to Plato and says the way he goes about repressing this subjectivity that is emerging shows how much he expressed the archaism of his time, he says, because you cannot repress what appears to freedom once it has appeared, you have to work with it — if you don't work with it, whatever you propose will end in totalitarian failure. You have to work with it, or not at all — and when he shows that this is the effort Plato made
1:33:53 in customs, to forbid a citizen from leaving the city before the age of 40, so as not to pick up bad habits in a foreign world, he says, well, that's the trick that doesn't work; but on the other hand, he says, the spirit and the principle — and here he says especially around which his method turns — and here I quote, I quote Hegel — is the world revolution that then occurs, colon — and this is Hegel's most famous phrase: what is rational is real, what is real is rational. It's curious because Hegel attributes it to Plato — indeed, the fact that in any discussion, in a Platonic dialogue, one proceeds through rationality — what do you mean, what do you call that, give a definition, and then you speak without contradicting what you said before — that, Hegel says, is a world revolution, because at that level there is universal democracy in potential. You remember we noted at the beginning, in mathematics, at the time of Euclid, what's called axiom and postulate, in short a first notion from which all the others will be derived, which were called in Euclid's time — and a term I like very much — 'demands,' an admirable term, which recalls, more than postulate or axiom, which leaves that intersubjective aspect in the shadows, that the first notions even of thought
1:35:03 the most abstract, the most theoretical, without an appeal to the other — grant me, I ask you to grant me that through a point only one straight line can pass, etc., and from there I can prove everything to you, but at the outset I cannot begin if there is no agreement with you on basic notions. So the universal is intersubjective or it is not — and here I think of Kant, this isn't to give you the spins, it's the same illustration of the fact that the universal passes through relation to the other, through intersubjectivity — with Kant the notion of objectivity is completely overturned, and it would not have made its advances without this Kantian breakthrough. There are two words to say 'object' in German, and Kant uses them very differently — there's object in the ordinary sense, in the sense that it's the object of my sight, for instance, or of my ears, if I make it resonate — Gegenstand has no sense here, it's the word, uh, hören, hören
1:36:23 That objectivity, says Kant, must not be confused with the real external world. It's true objectivity. In other words, Kant calls objective not what would be external to the subject, but what is valid for every subject. It remains between subjects. He shifted the problem of objectivity to the inside of the subject, but not the particular subject of course, not the particularity of each one. So it's an admirable advance. And it's around this pivot, to speak as Hegel does, that Plato elevates himself in the solution he proposes, by grounding his city on the effort of rationality proper to each person.
1:37:05 And so I'll illustrate this for you with Euclid's demands, to show, I don't know, that all mathematical objectivity — I'm taking the least disputable objectivity — rests at the outset on an appeal to the other. It's a fine dialectic on something that is not, properly speaking, epistemic. In other words, before saying A equals A, which is the first proposition, the proposition of identity, without which no discursive logic would be possible — you know we speak of hypothetico-deductive logic, if... then — that's why mathematics works.
1:37:38 If we look at the definition of the circle, we deduce from it that all the radii are equal. It's already in the definition, with equidistance, etc. So this way of proceeding, in which thought — thought, especially Western thought, in quotes, we've seen that's a rather vague concept — appropriates the world around us, and nature, technical thought, oddly enough, at the outset presupposes an agreement with the other and with oneself.
1:38:12 That's all that non-contradiction expresses. Let me open a small parenthesis on non-contradiction, because it's going to be the whole question in the texts we're reading. It's often said, yes, before Hegel there was classical logic, precisely the logic of non-contradiction, of identity, A equals A, to take up my point again, and with Hegel contradiction has a logical status, Hegel's thought is a thought that does not exclude contradiction. Yes, that's true, Hegel's thought does not exclude contradiction, but be careful, it never departs from the principle of identity and contradiction.
1:38:47 And here I'll refer to Aristotle, who is the one who defined with the most rigor — I'll do a bit of clarifying work — Aristotle, the so-called principle of non-contradiction, or more quickly, of identity. In the fourth book of the Metaphysics, Book Gamma if you prefer, in Greek, Aristotle introduces with great solemnity this famous principle which is at the base of all discursive thought, of all rational thought. And he uses it as a polemical argument against sophistic or skeptical opportunism, which says one can say anything and its opposite — he says no.
1:39:19 You don't need to agree with me, that's no problem at all, but I myself need you to agree with yourself, otherwise there's no point discussing. And so here's how he defines this principle. Two opposite attributes — heavy, light, small, big, old, young — two opposite attributes cannot belong to the same subject, at the same time, and in the same respect — three times 'same': same subject, same time, same respect. If I say Socrates is young while Plato is old — excuse me, it's rather the reverse, Plato was a student of Socrates — Plato is young, Socrates is old.
1:39:59 There's a contradiction between old and young, but well, since it's not the same subject, I'll go quickly, everyone has understood there's no contradiction here. Second condition, it must be at the same time. And indeed, what I could say — Socrates is old and Socrates is young — well yes, it depends at what point in his life. Both can be true. So it has to be for the same subject and at the same time. And Aristotle adds, rigorous as he is, wanting to leave nothing to chance, and in the same respect. Because I could say Socrates is, at the same moment, old in his arteries and young in spirit.
1:40:30 Yes. So all three conditions must be met together for there to be a contradiction. Now, Hegelian contradiction resolves itself in becoming — this is what we're in the process of seeing and what I'd like to bring you toward as a conclusion. We saw last time that we can't manage to say 'now' truly in an empirical sense, since between the 'now' and the holding of it, there is already an infinity of 'nows' that have passed, isn't there? So time is the truth of consciousness. So there's no departure from Aristotle's second principle. Contradiction exists — that's what constitutes Hegel's advance, it's true that before, contradiction was excluded, contradiction couldn't exist.
1:41:06 Contradiction exists, but it exists in the form of becoming. And this is illustrated in a concept that plays a very important role throughout Hegelian thought, the concept of 'moment,' which can sometimes just mean 'time,' and here I want to highlight it a bit more — moment, a concept borrowed from physics, isn't it? A moment is a couple of forces in physics. And the door handle, I think, among the most familiar instruments around us, gives us a simple, practical example for remembering what a moment is. That is, when I turn the handle like this, there's a first arrow going to the right, up top — this isn't from my hand — and an arrow going to the left, at the bottom.
Fear of death forms the slave 1:41:42 So, that's it, that's a couple of forces, a kinetic moment as we say in physics. It's a couple of forces of equal intensity but going in opposite directions. In opposite directions — but the mere fact that I suddenly bring them into opposition, they resolve themselves in time. So there's no contradiction at the same time. That's a parenthesis for those concerned with rigor, and rightly so. And so you see, the slave gradually emancipating himself from the master through his labor and gaining more and more power, we have this sentence: consequently, the truth — this is what you see — is no longer the certainty, the truth of independent consciousness, that is, of the master, is servile consciousness.
1:42:26 The master finds his truth in the slave. No doubt this servile consciousness appears at first outside itself and as not being the truth of self-consciousness. But just as domination shows that its essence is the reverse of what it wants to be — he becomes more and more dependent on objects, poor master, like the character in The Servant that I mentioned, who begs his servant to come back and clean his carpets again — likewise, servitude will become, in its own fulfillment, rather the opposite of what it was immediately. It will go into itself as a consciousness repressed within itself, and transform itself, through a reversal, into true independence.
1:42:58 This will be the whole trajectory of culture. And why? Because in the meantime the slave has gone through fear, and there follows a passage that I'll read to you in full because it's extremely concrete, it even has a literary resonance. We have seen only what servitude is in the behavior of domination. We have seen the slave as he stands in relation to the master. But servitude is self-consciousness, and we must now consider what it is in itself and for itself. First of all, at the outset, as a first stage if you prefer, it is the master who is the essence, whose truth is essential.
1:43:34 Its truth is, for it, the consciousness that is independent and is for itself. But this truth, which is for it, is not yet in itself. It has not yet made this truth of pure negativity and being-for-itself its own within itself. For it has not yet made the experience of this essence in itself. This consciousness has indeed experienced anguish, not about this or that thing. And here I stop. What drives it forward? The servile consciousness has had an experience, and suddenly it joins what constituted the master's strength. He's talking about the experience of death, quite simply.
1:44:05 in the labor of matter. This consciousness felt fear at the moment on the battlefield when it was seized as a slave. And this fear is an experience that remains indelible and has a formative function in the inner evolution of the slave. That's what Hegel is saying. And why? Because he's going to analyze this fear it felt, which is not just any fear, I repeat, but a founding fear. It's not just any anguish. I quote him now: this consciousness had indeed felt anguish, not about this or that thing — my little box, my wife, my mistress, my taxes, the bailiff — but it felt fear, yes, not about this or that thing, not during this or that moment, but it experienced anguish about the entirety of its essence — death — the entirety of its essence, for it felt the fear of death, comma, the absolute master.
1:44:58 That comes out under his pen every time — the absolute master. In this anguish it was dissolved, this consciousness, inwardly, trembling in the depths of itself. Dissolved — you have to take that concretely. It means that everything that was, for it, important, fixed determinations, values, evaporated. This consciousness had indeed experienced, yes, in this anguish it was dissolved inwardly, trembling in the depths of itself, and everything fixed wavered within it. It seems terrifying, but Hegel makes an almost reassuring remark. But such a movement, pure and universal, such an absolute liquefaction of all subsistence, is precisely the simple essence of self-consciousness as such.
Pascal, diversion, and liberation through labor 1:45:41 Self-consciousness — remember the word 'abstract' at the outset — is above all this anguish of pure negativity. Anguish which, as Pascal so admirably says throughout his whole work, distracts itself in the real. Pascal is the first who understood this function very well. He doesn't use the word 'negativity,' Pascal — I don't know if it's in his vocabulary — but he shows very clearly, in what is deepest in him, the analysis of diversion. And God knows this is no marginal theme in Pascal's work. Not only is it not marginal, but he says in the Pensées, you know this famous passage well: when I set myself to examine men, I noticed that all their unhappiness — this is important, not a minor detail —
1:46:19 all their unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room. Because as soon as he is at rest, when there's nothing left to distract him, he'll start thinking about his finitude, about death, etc. He'll become inconsolable. So it's good that he distracts himself. And he says, one shouldn't be clever and say that men are stupid to distract themselves while death awaits them — on the contrary, this shows man's wisdom, says Pascal. Very good. There, he saw negation, negation. Pascal is right — what's the use of chasing a hare all day long, which one wouldn't want if it were offered that same morning to the hunters at dawn.
1:46:54 No, you don't need the hunt, here — I've just come back from the butcher, he's offering you this hare. A real hunter isn't satisfied by that. What interests him after all — it has the smell of the morning mist, the hunt, the smell of the thickets. And there you are — and even in a forest where I see no animal, if I'm told I might see one, there's already more interest, it's a game I share with you, that if I'm told I won't catch it, there was never any to begin with. There, that's diversion. And so Pascal is the first, let's be serious, to explain what we desire not by the carrot in front of me that I try to catch, not by examining the object of desire I'm pursuing, but by making us think about what we're fleeing, what is behind us and not what is in front of us.
1:47:35 That's where Pascal grasped a form of negativity well. I wanted to pay him this tribute because moreover Hegel quotes Pascal — I have a passage in the Philosophy of Right where Pascal had been fierce against what we'd today call centrists. Spiritual centrists, not political centrism in the partisan sense — admirable men in every camp — spiritual centrists. I had a friend who had written a play, published in the Folio collection, called Arthur Adamov, who was a playwright of the time of Beckett and Ionesco, and who had written 'Monsieur le Modéré' ('Mr. Moderate').
1:48:12 It's terrible, because the world has been governed for some sixty years by moderates. And his Monsieur le Modéré is even more destructive, believe me, and bloody, than Monsieur le Maudit ('Mr. Damned'), who only ever commits isolated murders. That's deplorable but at least it's limited. There — moderate. Yes, someone who has a horror of extremes, who always wants to sit on that fence. And Pascal, quoting the Gospel, had cited that admirable passage from the Book of Revelation, what the Spirit says to the church at Smyrna — where the speaker says to someone who must have been a bit lukewarm in early Christian proselytizing: you are neither cold nor hot, you are lukewarm, and that is why I will vomit you out.
1:48:59 It's magnificent. So, here, well, we are not in half-measures. In this anguish — I repeat the whole passage — it was dissolved inwardly, trembling in the depths of itself, and everything fixed wavered within it — but, I recall the conclusion, such a movement, which seems an exceptional trauma, says Hegel, only reveals to us the simple essence, for every man, of his self-consciousness in the face of death. So one might say, but that's a despairing thought — that is, I thought this was my truth, so telling myself that, I might as well shoot myself, because I know I have to die, it ruins all my...
1:49:34 all the pleasures of life — I'll go further, because I was speaking of Pascal and using Pascal to construct an axiomatics — here, an axiomatics of death, I offer it to you. Pascal was, as you all know, in addition to being an immense thinker — I won't say a philosopher, extremely useful to philosophy, believe me, I'm not handing out prizes, and philosophers are the idiots, and very great thinkers, they aren't philosophers — so Pascal was also an immense mathematician, as you know, he invented probability calculus, he invented the first machine, the first calculator, you know, and at 16 he had already rediscovered all of Euclid's geometry through pure deduction, this frightening genius, as Chateaubriand, a good romantic, put it. Let's pause — I'll finish today on Pascal, alright, let's take a break right now — and the reasoning is this: man is finite, let's take that as the premise of the reasoning, finite in space through his body, in time through death, man is finite. Second, theorem — it's Pascal speaking — the finite is annihilated before the infinite, you agree, in relation to the infinite
1:50:44 10, 100, 1000, it's all the same, it's zero — the finite annihilates itself before the infinite; the mathematicians — it's the moment when infinitesimal calculus begins to appear. Pascal died a bit young at the very moment when Newton and Leibniz, his two rivals, were watching for Pascal's manuscripts — Leibniz did everything he could — Pascal died, and it was his mathematical manuscripts that mattered, it was industrial-scale stuff, this question of infinitesimal calculus — one doesn't joke, you see, about these questions of the infinite. So the finite annihilates itself before the infinite — cancellation, differentiation, etc. So if man is finite, it's because the finite continually annihilates itself before the infinite. You yourself just need to agree with yourself. So man is nothingness — what is finite is an infinite, man is nothingness, and therefore he has no nature — and you see how deep language is — he needs custom as a second nature in order to exist. He freely produces a new nature to which he is not assigned by biology, etc. He performs, as Hegel says, a ruse of reason: he uses natural laws to turn nature against itself. Here I'm going to build a little dam that will stop the river from overflowing — and that's the machine, for Hegel — man uses natural laws
1:51:54 to reverse natural processes — that's the ruse of reason. Reason is ingenious, it is an engineer, and it annihilates itself before the infinite, and so there is a second nature. Now one might say it's hopeless — well, with Pascal of course that gets resolved because the question of salvation after death — we're not there — ignorance is not learned, as poor Nerval would say. So, reflecting on this, Hegel here assures us of the essential thing about consciousness — it's to remind us — and it's no accident that I read you the text on the tool earlier — the tool that produced a world, that produced the world, which allows us to negate the negation that nature performed on us at the outset — a second negation that creates a new positivity. Why did I speak of it before? To understand what will now, I hope, become clear: it's not a tragedy to learn that we are mortal — we've known that for a long time. What matters is to recognize all the effort man has made since then not to remain stuck in this despairing thought, but to produce these prodigious occasions
1:53:05 for diversion — but not in the fun sense now, in the deepest sense possible, that is, through material economic production, man has distanced himself from this ancient fear. And that's why — it's not sentimentalism, excuse me, but when I see an old woman begging in the street, it turns me inside out — and if it's an old lady on top of that, it's really appalling. What's unforgivable is a society that is extremely wealthy, isn't it — not only that she should be materially deprived, people are used to depriving themselves of many things, but the moral distress — what do you want that to mean? It means that in a place and at a time of great material production, this woman is deprived not only of the ability to eat, to dress, to protect herself from the cold — of course that matters — but not only that, it's more serious, there's a crime, but not only a fault — it's that she's deprived of any means of thinking about anything else. It's all very well to have depression, but between having depression and 'my dear, it's nothing, just go spend a month in the Bahamas, I'll cure your depression' — I'm not criticizing, I'd love to be able to do that — it's not the same condition as that of someone with her own depression
1:54:15 while being so hard-pressed and wondering how she'll make ends meet at month's end. You see, in destitution there's an aspect that isn't only material — recognition by the other presupposes a certain social status that is denied — that's what is recalled here by this anguish: it is the simple essence of self-consciousness. It's not such bad news, and he means by this that the slave's consciousness has been culturally enriched with a knowledge that the master does not have — the master is more negated in relation to the real than the slave is, who knows that it's our relation to death and to matter that is decisive, and when one overcomes it, one is freed from it. So I repeat this passage: 'but such a pure and universal movement, one that has been brought about by fear, absolute fear, such an absolute fluidization of all subsistence — that is the simple essence of self-consciousness' — and we come back to absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which is thus present at last in this very consciousness — the consciousness of the slave. This moment of pure being-for-self is also for it, for in the master this moment is its object. This consciousness is no longer, then, this universal dissolution in general; in service it accomplishes this dissolution and effectively realizes it by serving
Mallarmé recognizes the workers who made the world 1:55:25 it suppresses, in all singular moments, its adherence to natural being-there, and by working it eliminates it, frees itself from it. And the chapter that follows is called Culture or Formation — Bildung — that allows for giving, Bild, an image. All right, let's take the break after this quotation, if you don't mind. I'll go on afterwards by returning to what I said about the tool, the instrument and work, and the fact that man produces a positivity that did not exist in the order of creation, producing in place of the earth what has become the world in relation to this tool — and the importance of, and what we owe to, those millions of anonymous workers who produced the world we live in, including the heritage, the heritages we enjoy. I'm referring to two texts I unfortunately don't have on hand, but which I warmly recommend, one of which is really
1:56:35 the most unexpected place to look for illustrations of the proletarian's sweat throughout the ages — in an elitist decadent poet in his ivory tower, I'm thinking of Mallarmé. I believe one of the most beautiful tributes ever paid to human labor is in a text by Mallarmé, part of a prose reflection — I like Mallarmé's prose a lot, I like his poems too, but I find his prose even more decisive. It's called Variations sur un sujet, and there are several chapters, the very first one is called 'Conflit.' Let me tell you the little story: the narrator is him, and in his meditations we come to understand — it's Mallarmé — we come to understand, roughly, that he was in the habit of taking a little walk in a small corner of the suburbs, toward a small pavilion, an abandoned house he liked, the owner not being there, to go and contemplate the sunset. And there it is, that
1:57:47 that evening he arrives as usual to see his little sunset with this lovely view, and lo, the place is spoiled for him because there's a squad of workers building a railway line. So he's terribly annoyed — it was his spot, he was consoling himself for the wretchedness of being there, and now all he sees — it clashes, it says he — it shrieks, it calls out to each other — in atrocious French, imagine — in short, right away a relationship of hostility toward those who are, for him, intruders. There's even a kind of power struggle that starts to take shape, almost comic, since Mallarmé says he'd gladly have a fistfight with one of them, which would illustrate the class struggle on the lawn — he's the one who says 'class struggle.' And then when he sees one of these burly workers call him a piece of dung — it's in the text — Mallarmé says 'impossible to annihilate him mentally' — I love that phrase because you can see him trying, as if, strong-minded, to complete the work of drink, to lay him in the ground — and the whole passage is admirable — he's tired, he runs to see in my place
1:58:57 but he's so right that, as the hours pass, the squad of workers lies there in a stupefied sleep of exhaustion, and Mallarmé continues on his way, saying, well, now I can finally step over them and walk on their — and then there's an admirable passage — it's a god, I cannot step over them, they created being, they created the world, they drew water from the spring, they built the temples, for man does not live by bread alone. It's an admirable passage — it's not, mind you, in Marx or Lenin, it's in Mallarmé, an aristocratic, elitist, decadent poet, that I find here a recognition in the Hegelian sense. I'm not asking anyone to militate for these poor people, but at least to hold Mallarmé's position, which is to recognize, at the very least, the determinations within which one finds oneself placed. There's a splendid tribute — I don't have the text in front of me unfortunately, but it's poetically admirable — a tribute to those who drew the strength to build the temples from — and he says, I cannot step over them, as if I would be doing something illicit, and they rob me
Logic, nature, spirit; subjective, objective, absolute spirit 2:00:09 right now, by their sleep more than, earlier, by their shouting, of the constellations. So that was a rearguard illustration in relation to the remarks in the first part, and in this second part I'd like, in preparation for presenting Hegel's citation next time, to spell out the main articulations of the system — I'm speaking in German-style terms — of the Hegelian system, since with the Phenomenology we don't yet see the system but rather all the stages consciousness must pass through, all the stages consciousness must pass through to reach that absolute knowledge in which the systematic presentation of knowledge consists. So that's what we're going to see now, and don't hold it against me if this takes a somewhat dogmatic turn — though it's no longer really dogmatic for you, since thanks to the Phenomenology you now know the mediations that mean this isn't just being asserted flatly, just like that. So, within Hegelianism as it can be taught as a ready-made corpus — I'll take the result, if you will, while asking you not to cut it off from the becoming that allowed it to be constituted — there is a permanent chaining
2:01:19 of circles in three stages — let me explain. There is a first, fundamental circle that proceeds in three stages: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, if you prefer, but that's the articulation of dialectic. These three stages are the Logos, Nature, Spirit — the three fundamental circles of the Hegelian system. The Logos first, which he spells out in his most developed work, the Logic — the great Logic, the Wissenschaft, the Science of Logic, which is the publication he devoted himself to right after the appearance of the Phenomenology of Spirit, from 1811 on. So the Logos, that is, the whole set of conceptual determinations at work in a language which you and I use to communicate. Then Nature, second circle — Nature, for Hegel, would be spirit alienating itself completely in nature, the privation of thought par excellence — and then the resurrection of spirit within nature, through spirit, through history, through man, roughly speaking. In other words, the Logos dies in nature
2:02:30 and rises again through history and through man, in Spirit — Logos, Nature, Spirit, those are the three circles. Then, within these circles, there are further divisions, again always in three stages — that's easy to spot, so I'll leave Nature aside for now, which doesn't concern me here — what Hegel said about physics or biology or chemistry — but I'll come straight back to the sciences of Spirit, and he divides Spirit into three stages: subjective spirit, objective spirit, absolute spirit. Now this seems dogmatic when one thinks of the system without its becoming — in fact, subjective spirit is everything one can say about spirit, about thought, in psychological terms if you like — subjective spirit, consciousness, the unconscious — these are things familiar to the educated person of the twentieth century. Objective spirit, on the other hand, is a properly Hegelian notion, less familiar — it's the exact opposite of the 'subjective' side — these are concrete things — objective spirit is spirit that has realized itself in objects, in institutions — studying the history of law, for instance, gives access to objective spirit
2:03:40 how human desire has instituted itself in texts, for example — he makes a point of this, Hegel, about the Code of Hammurabi, you know, the first legal code that appeared in human history — well, in archaeology anyway — it's on a stele, no big deal, thieves will have their hand cut off, all right — so there's the first legal code. Hegel tells us this seems barbaric to us, certain provisions, but what's remarkable is that for the first time law depended on a text recognized by all — it no longer depends on the arbitrariness of some bloody despot standing there, you see — there is a law to which everyone refers, that's no small thing. So that's objective spirit, in the sense of spirit that has objectified itself in something concrete, in something real, in something tangible, and within this spirit, of course, art, the state — that's an incarnation of spirit in objectivity. The state — of course when he says 'the state,' it can just as well be a system of chieftaincy deep in the Amazon, in a tribe — I open a little parenthesis here, because there are some — especially those who've studied Deleuze — who believe, since Deleuze has extensive developments on the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized, and who believe that
2:04:51 certain current documentaries even try to illustrate this — that the modern state would be the beginning of totalitarianism — I'm thinking of certain documentaries, because I imagine you may have seen some as I have, where it's suggested that the shift to agriculture, to settling down, would be the beginning of barbarism, and that only the Paleolithic hunter would be a man worthy of the name, and that the instant man settled down, instituted himself, he became a savage. So I'd like to point out, on this score, that when one believes, as Deleuze does, who has these kinds of — I'm lucky here — in a world with no codified law, I'd remind you that there are African peoples — I don't like saying the word too quickly — there are African peoples speaking a common language, for instance, among whom it is forbidden for a woman even to think — I don't even want to pronounce it, because that would be even worse — to think the name of her husband while she has her period, since that would defile him
2:06:01 I can hardly imagine a world as totalitarian as that one, where the law comes to track down the individual even in what he thinks — go and check that out — it's enough for someone to tell me not to think for me to be tempted to think, it's terrible, that sort of thing. Well, let me still point out, when I say 'the state,' don't think that the state is unique to modern society and that there are happy societies that know nothing of the state — from the moment there is a law that institutes circumcision for boys, infibulation and excision for girls, we are within the order of the State. So all that is what Hegel calls objective spirit — we're not trying to get inside people's heads, to do psychology — because I think the interior expresses itself — the interior has expressed itself — it has made tools, it has built states, it has created civilizations — and there, one catches the content of desire red-handed. And so when we deal with objective spirit, for Hegel, we are much closer to the depths of the spirit — you see the dialectic: spirit having externalized itself, we see its depth better than when we look for it inside, in some 'I don't know what' — intent-mongering is always dubious, and fortunately, in legal terms, imputing intent — and finally, the last stage
Symbolism, classicism, romanticism; Egyptian, Greek, Christian gods 2:07:11 so subjective spirit, objective spirit, absolute spirit — and within absolute spirit, again three stages — doesn't that make your head spin? On the contrary, it's easier once redone — within absolute spirit, that is, the last stage of spirit where it finally finds itself again after all these forms of alienation it has traversed in history, there are three stages. Now here I'll slow down — Art, this is to announce next Thursday — Art, Religion, Philosophy. Let me point out in passing how precise this hierarchy is — we suspect Hegel often has a mystical undercurrent, and it's the young Marx who often returns to this point, saying that his dialectic is an excellent method that gets trapped in a mystical husk. Hegel does not place religion as the ultimate stage of spirit, whereas religion, in general, ought to be the crowning achievement for a religious person — the crowning point is not — of all the stages of consciousness, no, it's the second-to-last. Religion — above it there is philosophy, with the necessity of reflection, of separation, of thought, etc.
2:08:15 And so I come back to my three stages: Art, Religion, Philosophy. It's important to see these stages, because I'm sketching out in broad strokes what I'll detail next time — but if I isolate Art now as one of these domains of objective and absolute spirit, where man was not content with having — ah, this is really bizarre — apparently it's the conference of the birds — but yes, it's just that it's the birds' hour — you've lost half an hour — I'd like to call myself Saint Francis of Assisi, the birds — but it's bird hour, they're coming back to the nest, and this is the great commotion — there's a very beautiful painting by Giotto of Saint Francis of Assisi speaking to the birds — well, here it's the birds speaking to me, but you just need to speak a bit louder than them, okay, I'll try — go on, raise your voice — I don't think they agree — they're doing their own thing, no, they're interested in something else. So, if I isolate Art within the triad Art-Religion-Philosophy, you again have three stages within Art — I'll dig a little into the first one — it's what he calls symbolism, the second, classicism, and the third
2:09:25 Romanticism — and for him this corresponds to historical divisions — it's not history, but it corresponds to historical divisions. What he calls symbolism, roughly, and he refers to it often, is Oriental art — Oriental art is an extensive concept, it includes the millions of figures teeming in the sculptures on a Hindu temple, characterized by this proliferation — well seen, the prolific substance — the Orient. So if you compare that to a day, taking a unit of time as you wish — the classical theatrical day — you'd have the morning of spirit, which would be Oriental art, the Oriental; you'd have the evening, which is our world, the Hesperian world, as Hölderlin would say, the Western world — 'Hesperian' in Greek says what 'Occidental' says in Latin, declaimed — and between the two there needs to be a moment of noon — you guess it's Greece. So spirit rising in the Orient reaches its zenith at noon — that doesn't mean it's reached its perfection at noon and that afterward nothing is worth anything anymore — on the contrary, it means it still lacks a dimension — but I can't get ahead of myself, and finally
2:10:35 Christian art — so you see, there's a whole system of analogy: symbolic or substantial art is what we'll see, that is, the moment when he's going to distribute all three stages of art with two terms, content and form — two concepts that keep coming up in aesthetic discussion. So what characterizes Oriental art is that content seeks its form and doesn't find it — it's the beginning, so it does violence to matter — and that, as I alluded to, is the proliferation of subjects on a Hindu temple, of details in the illustrations of a sacred book of Chinese thought — you'll see two thousand demons teeming — it's not pejorative, all this — these are the incarnations of the absolute, for Hegel, let's not forget — all these are divisions of absolute spirit, they're tributes rendered to it — and he is, moreover, the first to write a work, a great Aesthetics, in which he asks his readers to pay tribute to humanity's millennia-long effort to realize and incarnate itself in objective achievements
2:11:45 and therefore shareable, let it be said in passing. So content seeks its form and doesn't find it — it's subjected to violence, the infinity of Oriental substance — I'll come back to it, of course we're not done with the Orient, far from it — with the Greek world, content finds its form, there's a balance between content and form — and with the Christian or Romantic world, content exceeds form. So in the first, the Orient, it seeks it; in the second, Greece, it finds it; in the third, the modern, Christian or Romantic world, it exceeds it — Christian in the cultural sense, of course, it doesn't matter whether one is an atheist or a believer, that changes nothing here, it's a matter of culture. So let's look at this more closely: let's compare the representation of God, of the absolute, in art — no theological discussion — if we look at Egyptian art, for example, at the Greek god, and at the Christian god, there is an astonishing progression of coherence — somewhere in this progression, I'm speaking of Oriental art, so as not to
2:12:55 take the Egyptian model — the god crushes man, it's the titanic god, the colossal god, the colossi of Memnon, hieratic, seemingly barely logical, seemingly indifferent to suffering, to the soul-weariness of daily life, made for eternity, 'such as into himself eternity changes him,' if I may say so, of the Egyptian divinities — and at the same time a fusion of animality and humanity — gods with a jackal's head, an ibis's head, Thoth, I mention Thoth because he's the patron of intellectuals, the ibis beak, supposed to write with its beak, how clever, the scribe-god, it's a nice image. All right, so there, spirit is making an enormous — the sphinx, lion with a man's head or man with a lion's head — there's an effort at spirituality to break free from the natural determinations of animality that fascinate the Greeks — whereas in Greek statuary all relation to animality, to nature, has disappeared — it's a man, I'd almost say like you and me, with one nuance of course, that is, he's more overwhelming, more colossal, he's about 1.70m tall
2:14:05 75 or so — but there's something missing — yes — and what will supply it is the representation of the Christian god, that is, this sort of puny wretch twisting in suffering on a cross — and there, there's a step forward in depth — what was lacking in the Christian god is having plumbed the depths of the notion of evil, of suffering — it's an admirable analysis — that is, as one moves from the god of the colossi of Memnon to Christ suffering on the cross, passing through the Apollo Belvedere, or however you like, you have a representation of the divine that grows closer and closer to man — which is what makes Hegel say this magnificent phrase: 'The Orientals knew that one alone is free; the Greeks knew that some — the citizens — are free, not the slaves; the moderns know that all are free in potentiality.' And that's precisely why, for him, from the moment this gets confirmed in an almost materialist way, if I may put it in Marxist terms, Christianity corresponds historically to the abolition of that productive force, if you want to use a Marxist term
2:15:15 for those interested — what is the productive force that is the base of all antiquity before the advent of Christianity? It's the slave, it's human or animal muscular labor power — but human in this case. From the moment man no longer has to bow before a sovereign — render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's — he can no longer bow before a sovereign, but before someone who is never there — man no longer bows down, that's Christian emancipation. It's no accident, moreover, that Christianity started becoming popular among the population of slaves in the outskirts of Rome — originally, this film had such success precisely because it was in tune with the new mentality — imagine that a man like Crassus, who belonged to the second triumvirate after Caesar's death, Crassus alone, a private individual as we'd say today, had 10,000 slaves all to himself — that's the limit, that's imperial Rome after all, I'd say — and you see, in the balance of power he alluded to earlier, if those 10,000 slaves unite, Crassus doesn't stand a chance. I'll go back and return to Plato — I recommend you
2:16:25 read the Gorgias, which is perhaps the most intensely dramatic of Plato's dialogues, more than a masterpiece, a political masterpiece in my view, where there's a discussion at one point with a sophist precisely about the notion of force — and Socrates puts forward this completely outlandish hypothesis, for the sophist and even for common opinion, that it's better to suffer injustice than to commit it. 'You won't be,' the other says to him, 'you'd prefer to be the guy being tortured rather than to inflict' — our example is right there — 'that's not possible, come on, if you're not caught, it's better to do wrong and profit from it than to be a poor victim' — and so the exclusion, that's it, but that's not our problem so I move on. And at one point he says, 'so what's the principle for you,' Socrates asks, 'and for me it's force,' says the other, very well — so in that case, since the interlocutor had said something rather pre-Nietzschean — Callicles is the interlocutor's name — 'yes, all your laws, your morals, everything the city says one shouldn't do this, should do that — those are things the weak invented to cast nets over us, the exceptional individuals, over the strong, over the masters' — it's stated in so many words in the Gorgias, you see, we think it's Nietzsche who said it a century ago, but it's a 2000-year-old thought — and religion, its threat
2:17:35 of punishment after death — these are incantations, that's the word used, as one tells stories to make children sleep, to scare them so they'll sleep, likewise people tell stories like that so that we'll be punished if we've done wrong and so on, and it's to muzzle elite individuals, that is, the strongest. Fine, very well, little Nazi-Socrates types have a word for the Callicles-types — so he says, but in that case, what do you call force — the discussion becomes serious, becomes properly Socratic and Platonic — physical force, in that case — he says, I think of Crassus — the city united is nonetheless always stronger than an isolated tyrant — so, well, that's not right, no, I wasn't talking about physical force, I also meant the cleverest, you hear that often, don't you, the little bosses who've made their way, the cleverest, the force of intelligence — and Socrates tells him, you see, you reproach me for always saying the same thing, and I reproach you for never saying the same thing — sometimes force is physical force, sometimes it's intelligence, we're not going to know. All right, so much for force — so I come back to my point, the divine
2:18:45 which is asymmetrical — the Egyptian divine, which is colossal and crushes the creature, and the creature trembles before the statue — it's quite different, the legs pressed together, you see, Hegel is concrete, he starts from the work, he lets the work speak, he doesn't try to speak over the work, he doesn't interpret — the movements are far more constrained, it's not an aesthetic reproach, it's what makes these masterpieces, precisely because it conforms to the world in which — the Egyptian, the movements aren't very — whereas the Greek god has one foot in front of the other, his mouth open to speak, not to eat like the crouching scribe, and so on — but there's a kind of serenity in the Greek god, a serenity beyond all conflicts, which means he still lacks a dimension for the human figure — which, for Hegel, is spirit incarnating itself through all these progressive approaches to itself — a dimension of suffering is still missing, which precisely will be supplied by
Culture is neither natural simplicity nor enjoyment 2:20:04 and I can illustrate this with a very clear text from the Philosophy of Right, one that's quite relevant to certain current inclinations to return to patriarchal societies or degrowth — you know this better than I do, I'd almost say — you'll see what he says about it here. So: conceptions of the innocence of the state of nature, of the simplicity of the mores of primitive peoples, you know, Hulot — ah, those populations living in harmony with nature — well, he's got a gadget I'll never have, some kind of, what do you call it, a microlight?
2:20:47 yes, you fly over the country, it's admirable, the images — I mute the sound and keep — there, he tells us these peoples live in harmony with nature — while all these peoples want is a tenth of the gear he has, all right, let's move on. So: conceptions of the innocence of the state of nature, of the simplicity of the mores of primitive peoples, on the one hand, and, on the other, sensuality — the opposite, the modern world, for which consumerism, we'd say today, for which needs, their satisfaction, the pleasures and comforts of particular life are absolute ends — both share one and the same corollary. You see the genius of Hegel, seeing in two apparently opposed positions a common point: the belief in the external character of culture, as if in both cases culture were something imposed on us from outside, as if it did not correspond to a necessary movement of consciousness. It is regarded, in the first case, in these patriarchal societies now given actuality by these bearded men people want to bring to power, who have been brought to power in Libya, brought to power through petrodollars by buying votes in Tunisia, in Egypt — I'm going a bit fast, we can discuss it, I agree, I'm the first to agree with the client — and whom people are trying to bring to power in Syria — a patriarchal society where the woman is thoroughly muzzled, kept at home, the patriarchal society, and that's — what
2:21:57 he's talking about the guys — he had them right in his own backyard, without going far. It is regarded, in this first case, in these patriarchal societies, as corrupting — very topical — in the second case, they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, and idols more recently — as corrupting — in the second case, as a mere means, culture, to arrive at enjoyment, etc. Both opinions alike betray a misunderstanding of the nature of spirit and of the ends of reason. Spirit has its reality only if it divides itself within itself, if it gives itself natural needs and relations to external necessity as its limit and its finitude, and if, in forming itself through them, it inserts itself into them and thereby sublates them and obtains its objective existence — the rational end, that's the most important sentence, is therefore neither this natural simplicity of mores — there, for degrowth — nor the pleasures that one obtains through civilization, in the development of particularity — Strauss-Kahn, I bring him back up, do you want me to make a parenthesis about Strauss-Kahn, I'll tell you, because he disgusts me — no, no, no, no, no — but it's so topical, I can't help myself, it's logical
2:23:07 What disgusts me, I'll surprise you, is the disgust he inspires — having lived quite a long time in Africa, as I've often said, I'm disgusted by the activity of Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, who violated millions of women in the countries where he instituted what's euphemistically called at the IMF 'SAPs,' Structural Adjustment Programs — those things are so gallantly worded — it means that an IMF specialist arrives in one of the poorest countries in the world, to a point you can't even imagine — I'm thinking of Mali, Burkina, or Niger — Niger, the highest birth rate in the world, struck every year, we occasionally mention it in passing, mostly by cholera, sometimes it's drought, famine, always famine — and there arrives an IMF specialist who tells one of the poorest countries in the world, 'you're living beyond your means, would you please liquidate half of the civil service and privatize it' — you created the bureau, I know, I know one, a bureau for aid to privatization — while everyone knows that in these countries a civil servant's salary may support perhaps 100 people through knock-on effects — that's what a civil service is — you triple the price of
2:24:17 basic food staples — that's vital, after all — you triple the price instead of controlling prices Soviet-style, and, well, we'll maybe lend you a billion, and we'll recoup it through interest, because the IMF, in financial terms, has no flag — a flag is a default — it has no flag anywhere, everything gets repaid down to the last penny. So it's really extraordinary to see that it's in the least developed countries that I find what a man, as head of the IMF, did harm to millions of women — I think of retired Estonian women, we don't need to look as far as Mali — these Baltic countries, weren't they supposed to regain both prosperity and freedom after the fall of the Wall — result, I think of the Poles, they can't even get abortions anymore, and on top of it they've discovered unemployment — not that it was better before, but frankly they deserved better than that, they hoped for better than that when they fought against their dictatorship, than the worst of ourselves. And so the Estonian retirees have 50 euros a month in retirement, in Estonia, since Strauss-Kahn passed through — and yet we never talk about it, it wasn't a scandal at the time, no, he was an admirable man
2:25:27 who was the best candidate, remember the consensus that swept up the socialists, that's it, I'll close this parenthesis — no, but it's not — I could say not at all — we're right in the subject, because Hegel is talking about the development of particularity in enjoyment, we're right in it — but on top of it, having a clean conscience, that's really something, and he gets caught, why — that's better handled than me, in matters of men and women, which I'm not neglecting after all, but still, you see, what Hegel is saying is very concrete here, so excuse me. So: the rational end is therefore neither this natural simplicity of mores — not that one should draw a step backward from it, it's not the bitterness of an embittered man — nor the pleasures one obtains through civilization's development of particularity — rather it is a matter of subjecting to a work of clearing, almost agricultural in tone, the simplicity of nature, that is, the passive privation of self and the uncultivatedness of knowledge and will, or again, of subjecting to a work of clearing immediacy
2:26:37 and individuality, in which spirit is shipwrecked, and of giving this externality the external rationality of which it is capable, the form of universality, conformity to the understanding. Hegel admired — that's why this passage came to mind — the Egyptians for having achieved the pyramids, that almost geometric form of crystal, the pyramid like that, of crystal — in nature you find everything except that kind of symmetry, that kind of — to show that here one breaks completely with the given order, it's something created by man, sui generis. So, and this progression, whereby we move from a content seeking its form, to a content that finds it and balances with it in the Greek world — there we've moved from symbolism to classicism, what's characteristic of classicism is this balance between content and form — and to a Christian world that will be far more tormented, aesthetically, you'll have no doubt, right up to art and literature today, in the sense that 'today' dates roughly from the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, from Romantic malady, and from what follows it, and its attempts at escape into post-Romantic hedonism — two dead ends, we've clearly seen that in Hegel these are two one-sided moments
Romanticism, the sphinx, and freedom as the meaning of history 2:27:47 of the same unresolved contradiction. It's worth today reflecting on this three-stage progression, because if Romanticism — what does that mean, something I've commented on less — content exceeds form — it means that spirit, once it knows itself, once it has arrived at self-consciousness, can no longer find in externality anything that sends its image back to it, because any form, any determination will be inferior to the depth it has discovered in itself. And that's why moderns are never satisfied with their work, isn't that so?
2:28:26 If you look at poems like Baudelaire's 'La Muse malade,' because there's a typical theme of modernity, first, creative impotence — as Mallarmé would say, 'the empty paper that whiteness defends' — the dread of literary sterility — the void wasn't the problem, that's not Sophocles — literary sterility was more or less inspired depending on the day, but his dread wasn't 'my god, everything's already been said' — that's the modern world — everything has already been expressed, so, anyway, whatever I write will always be an inferior determination compared to the sublimity of my thought, etc. So, 'the empty paper that whiteness defends' — I love that image — defends against what?
2:29:04 against the pen, no doubt, like a shield. There, so, the whiteness of Mallarmé's paper, the silence of Rimbaud, which halts all poetic activity so he can flee off to Ethiopia, the blank canvas of Kandinsky — none of this arises by chance, it illustrates exactly what Hegel says: content has reached a point where it can no longer intuit and find itself again in aesthetic representation — something is needed that goes beyond representation. And it's so important, this struggle of the concept against representation, that he even makes it a reproach — though he's very closely watched by censorship — but a deficiency from the religious point of view, whatever the religion — he says religion is the last, one of the highest stages of consciousness, perhaps the highest, where the absolute at last finds itself again — but in the mode of representation, not of the concept — we'd say today, in the symbolic order. So there remains still to wrest from the symbol its mystery — and speaking of mystery, Hegel was fascinated by the progression
2:30:14 of the figure of the sphinx — you see, I'm going back — from Egypt to Greece — the sphinx, the figure that fascinates him most in Egyptian art, he calls it 'the symbol of the symbol' — he says it sums up, like a metonymy, all by itself, the beauty of Egyptian art — it's the art of mystery, the art of the enigma. And he says, but as for this enigma, don't think, as some people say about extraterrestrials who supposedly came to found humanity, those flying saucers and so on — it's much more straightforward than that, and the Egyptians themselves did not have the solution to the riddles they proposed, it was an enigma for the Egyptians too. But when we move to Greece, you know, the sphinx appears in the myth of Oedipus, since before entering Thebes, before the irreparable is accomplished, access to Thebes is barred to him by the sphinx, which devours all passers-by who fail to solve precisely these riddles. Now it happens — and this didn't fall on deaf ears with Hegel — what is the riddle the sphinx poses to Oedipus? Here, well, that's the answer
2:31:24 there, but the question is: what is the animal that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening? Well, of course, Oedipus finds it's man, since on four legs like the baby crawling as best he can, on his two feet at noon when man is mature, and then of course with a stick, a cane, on three legs in the evening — never mind the anecdote, what matters is that the answer to what was an enigma for symbolic antiquity is man — that's what Hegel saw as profound in the myth of Oedipus. And indeed, the Greek gods are less crushing and much more human, in a manner of speaking, with the nuance that evil and suffering are not yet plumbed and are rather elided — one sees that it's the art of masters, I don't know, in what follows — so you see this progression, and well, it's ultimately a progression that lets us resolve the aporia which is still an aporia of thought today: it's the discussion of whether history has a meaning — we discuss it as a commonplace from existentialism right up to today, and the discussion
2:32:35 often gets stuck between these two viewpoints: there are those who think it has a meaning, but a meaning meaning there'd be some linear path one should conform to — which seems to compromise aspirations to freedom somewhat — and then those who say no, history is a series of absurdities, there is no meaning. This question has been posed since Hegel of the meaning of history — the problem of history already, yes, but the meaning — already, history before Hegel is not properly a philosophical subject — it's only starting with Hegel that history — but not only that, there was something before him, people knew the maximum about history that you could know, but he's the first to say to what extent history is constitutive of our being — that's his main contribution. Kant before him had indeed written, 'Reason in History,' sorry, excuse me, the essay toward a philosophy of history from a cosmopolitan point of view, but those were approaches — but never in Kant is history constitutive of the individual. So, is there a meaning, and if so, is it totalitarian — that's roughly the terms of the discussion as it's usually recorded, and if not, it's an absurd world
2:33:45 and chaotic. Now, by putting freedom in place of meaning — 'the Orientals knew that one alone is free, the Greeks know that some are free, the moderns know that all are free' — I mean, Hegel lifts the aporia, because if we make freedom the meaning of history, then it's not a linear meaning imposed which, like a program, an operating program like a computer program, will unfold inexorably whether we like it or not — it means it can fail, it's up to you as much as to me to make the meaning of history fail at any moment — that's called barbarism. What's monstrous for me, what's most monstrous in the crimes of the modern world, of the twentieth century in particular, isn't the crimes in themselves — man is old, you know, when you look at it closely — I'm not trivializing, I mean the atrocities, the age of the Assyrians, Genghis Khan, whatever you like, I mean we have nothing new to invent when it comes to suffering, torture, etc., unfortunately man's imagination is as old as his appearance on that score — I have a parenthesis here, it'll annoy some people, sorry for the digression, but I don't think I'm straying much — Hobbes said man is a wolf to man, that, well, that's well known, that proposition — to which Spinoza retorted, homo homini deus, man is a god to man — Spinoza is nonetheless
2:34:55 more subtle than Hobbes, because Spinoza contains Hobbes, and the reverse isn't true — Spinoza helps us understand Hobbes, because it's precisely because man is a god to man that he anticipated very well what Hegel says about recognition — man needs to be recognized as man by man, who shows himself more monstrous than any wolf toward his fellow man when that recognition is not granted him, period. There, I'll say, anyway, I'll close the parenthesis. So what's monstrous is not the crimes in themselves, it's the fact that they arose among people like you, like me, in a society that thought it had freed itself from barbarism, that was steeped in refinement, civilization, and humanism — that's what's monstrous, it's a regression, and insofar as it was a regression, that's what makes it monstrous — it's the return of barbarism within a society that shouldn't harbor it. The barbarian of the origins is incomparably less guilty — the animal isn't guilty at all, whatever apparent atrocity the animal commits, there's no good or evil in nature — than the one who brings back the pure relation of force into something that, since the dawn of time, has timidely tried to institute law in place of force — so this is, here, truly a regression
2:36:06 So by making freedom the meaning of history, and by saying right away that it's not so linear that it can capsize — that's why I made this allusion, I'm not especially pessimistic, but I showed you that it's up to humanity to see to it that this freedom doesn't go into the abyss. Freedom is not the good, freedom is the possibility of doing evil just as much as good, but it's also evil. So I mean this is a position: by putting freedom in the place of meaning, you have the only way to give an intelligibility to history, to human behavior. Everyone can be free, be recognized by the other as such. If I pay — if I pay a woman, a pretty woman, every day to tell me every morning when I wake up, 'you're the most handsome, you're the most intelligent,' etc.
2:36:47 I'm going to be delighted the first time — not the first morning, if I'm vain, and we all are — the second day it's charming, it already seems a bit less credible to me; the third day I'm fed up; by the end of eight days — I didn't invent this, it's Voltaire in Zadig who imagines a sovereign like that, who was a bit vain, and Zadig wants to win him over, and he hires an orchestra to tell him his praises every morning, something like 'you are the greatest king of the Orient, everyone admires you from Bikini to Cidici,' etc., and he finds it delightful the first morning, and then it becomes unbearable, to the point of nausea, because it's repeated every morning. So what I mean is, what interests me is that it be said to me freely. How could someone else's recognition be gratifying for me if it doesn't come from a free being? So if being free for me means being recognized as such by the other who is free, then I have an interest in the other being free too. I'm not doing morality, I'm not saying it's not good that there are poor and rich people, that it's not good, look, they're unhappy — no, that's not morality, that's not a matter of ought-to-be, I'm not in Kant, I'm in Hegel on this point. I don't know if this is a conclusion, but I invite you to reach one quickly, because we have more light now and you can hear us better than with the birds — I don't know what you think.
2:37:57 But I think that would be a fine conclusion — it's not a bad one, it's not bad news, there you go.
