English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The dogmatist and the skeptic faced with beauty 0:00 Philosophia 26, the two enemies of the philosopher, the dogmatist and the skeptic, by Dominique Pagani. The philosopher always has two great enemies who have escorted him from the beginning, who existed before him and who escort him, I mean, who were there before Socrates. Go on, I'll tell you, it's the dogmatist and his enemy, the skeptic. They can't stand each other, but they're allied against the philosopher. The dogmatist, you know, is the one who, when asked what is beauty, says, it's the Parthenon. He's never left Athens. The skeptic is the one who says, no, look at the Hottentot women there, who have callipygian buttocks, you see, that has nothing to do with the Venus de Milo.
0:32 So, your beauty, it doesn't exist, it's only in your head where you're relative, that's the skeptic. You see, so one of them doesn't need to ask the question of whether we can know, since he knows. Beauty is the Parthenon. And the other one doesn't need to ask it either, since there is no beauty. Well, you see, both of them are lazy. They spare themselves the essential thing for the philosopher, the inquiry. You see, both answer the question before asking it. For one, the inquiry is finished, he knows beauty. Ah, the Parthenon! Oh, the Venus de Milo! And for the other, the inquiry is useless.
1:03 Right? Because there is no truth, there's no such thing. You know them too, they're the ones who act clever. Well, we've seen that the only difference between the two is that one stayed home and the other traveled a bit. But whether you stay home or travel, if you only use your eyes to know, you remain in error. One sees only the Parthenon and the other has seen a little more, so to speak, of forms of beauty. It's Socrates who reminds them that when we say something is beautiful, whether it's the Hottentot saying it of the callipygian woman or the admirer of the Venus de Milo, it means it pleases me. If it pleases me, it's because it satisfies a desire.
1:34 If it satisfies a desire, we shouldn't look for the key to beauty outside, with our eyes. And so, no matter the difference in forms, seasons, countries, climates, and cultures, what matters is to know what this desire is that makes me have a pleasure I call beautiful, which is quite different from the pleasure I get either from eating, or from being satisfied with a tool with which I've been able to make a piece of furniture — a specifically aesthetic pleasure, but one which, insofar as it pleases me, is beautiful, it pleases me. She's beautiful, she pleases me. He's beautiful, he pleases me. And if it pleases me, another implication is that it satisfies a desire, whether I'm conscious of it or not changes nothing.
Doxa and science: from certainty to truth 2:06 You see, these two enemies who predate philosophy, because my dogmatist and my skeptic, you know them, you meet them at the corner café every day — you may not go to the corner café, I like to, don't think I'm being anti-elitist for effect, the fashion is anti-populism, so I'm defending the corner café, there's no reason not to, against the scoundrels who rail against populism the moment they feel threatened, calling populist anything that threatens the status quo, but no, that's just the new fashion. So, let's insist on this point, you know them, the dogmatist and the skeptic, they were there before philosophy, that's what's called doxa in Greek, it's a discourse that can sometimes be interesting, and can even be very interesting for playing the clever one, for seducing, or for complaining, whatever — it has no aim at truth to begin with, it's rather a will to power, to exert influence over an audience, it's opinion.
2:55 Science, on the other hand, is privileged, it has arrived at knowledge — how did it do that. You see why the philosopher takes an interest in science, it's not to do the same thing, it's to see, first of all it's to prove to the skeptic that there is knowledge: if A equals B, then B equals A, that's knowledge, it's not subjective, it's not this, it's not that, it's not relative, it's interesting. And everything that follows from it is called equivalence relations in mathematics. If Peter is Paul's brother, if Peter is Paul's brother, then Paul is Peter's brother, and so on. And parallel lines to each other, likewise. There are plenty of things like that which belong to the order not merely of certainty, but of truth.
3:29 You're starting to see the difference: certainty is dogmatic. I'm certain that I'm standing on solid ground, you see it doesn't move — it moves at 30 km per second around the sun, you see. But that is the truth. It took millennia to move from certainty to a few truths. One must be humble. It's the heroic, patient, and laborious path of the sciences.
