English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Philosophy is not a wisdom 0:30 Good evening everyone.
1:00 A big thank you again to Adrien for crossing the Île-de-France with his bike so that you can see this session of our workshops, which I'm going to concentrate on. Given the delay I've built up in answering questions, better late than never, I'm still going to start by answering a fairly recent question, but I think it's a question from Laurence, if I remember correctly, who asks me to talk about the relationship between Plato and Aristotle.
1:46 Well, that's an excellent question, as it happens—I'm not here to hand out grades, but for 2500 years the history of philosophy has oscillated between two poles, which are Plato and Aristotle, which is why it's interesting. We'll explain, of course. So, first, a few reminders and a few clarifications.
2:16 Plato is the first great system of philosophy that has come down to us in writing. He was for a long time a student of Socrates, who literally initiated him into philosophy—I won't go back over that. I'll just recall that well before Socrates there are dizzyingly profound thoughts in the Eastern world, in the Indian world—Brahmanism, Buddhism—Taoism in China, Zen in Japan, whatever you like, among Muslim mystics, the Sufis.
2:48 But that is not philosophy, those are wisdoms. This isn't a value judgment at all. I'm not saying it's less important than philosophy. What I'm saying—and this is an important reminder—is: philosophia... you know what a Francophile is, someone who loves the French. It's the opposite of -phobes, of Francophobes.
3:21 Now, what we love, what we desire—the money we desire is not the money we already have in our pocket. If we desire wisdom, it's because we don't have it. Philosophies are not wisdoms. There is an element of questioning, of calling into question, of breaking with immediate certainties, which is far from the profound certainty that often pervades wisdoms, whether of religious or secular inspiration.
3:54 That's another problem. I say this because Brahmanism, for example, is a very important part of the traditional Hindu religion. Buddhism, on the other hand, is not a religion, it's a wisdom. I dare you to find the name of a God in Buddhism. Unlike Jehovah, Allah, Jupiter, or Wotan among the Germans.
Plato, from the condemnation of Socrates to the Academy 4:29 So, Wut means rage. Over Paris. The chief of the gods is the one who unleashes lightning, as with the Greeks. Let's go back to Plato and Aristotle. So, Socrates left no writing. But fortunately he found himself an assistant, as they say among architects, someone who stages him throughout his work, namely Plato, of course. Plato, who remained for a long time in Socrates' school, fortunately for us places Socrates in all his dialogues, in that very original form.
5:13 Plato is undoubtedly the greatest artist in the history of thought, the director, the filmmaker. You should see his prologues, his epilogues—it's great art, before the properly philosophical discussion even begins. So, Plato in Socrates' school. And Aristotle, yes, sorry, I'm going a bit fast.
5:45 Plato—I don't want to summarize his whole life, but anyway, he was part of what we'd today vulgarly call the establishment. Normally he should have had a career as a young candidate for political office in the city. Except he was influenced by his teacher Socrates. And an event occurred which suddenly made Plato the immense philosopher we have inherited.
6:15 It's when Socrates was condemned. How can the most just man in the city be condemned by that very city? Yes, philosophy begins with a political scandal, doesn't it? Now, Plato had such renown in antiquity, fortunately. So there were many copies of his texts, which means that even a few letters of his correspondence have come down to us.
6:46 We have very, very few letters from the fifth century before Christ, can you imagine? We have about ten letters or so, and in the famous seventh letter, written to his own people, as he says, to his relatives, to his family, he recounts the dramatic sequence of his stay in Sicily, where he had been summoned by Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse—tyrant at the time simply meant king of Syracuse—who had heard about Plato and had invited him, as we'd say today, as a consultant, to advise him in the exercise of power.
7:31 And in fact, Plato quickly became unbearable, because the tyrant saw everything he'd have to give up in order to comply with Plato's recommendations. He got annoyed, had Plato arrested, and sold him as a slave—not nice. Fortunately Plato had connections, as I told you, in great families, and he was bought back, which was common practice at the time; still, he'd been through the ordeal of the quarries, that trauma, and he writes—here's the passage I need to get to—which shows well the relationship of philosophy to crisis, as you know, we've already seen it, all the great moments, all the great advances in the history of philosophy have always taken place in a context of crisis.
8:23 And so in that letter he ends up saying—this is when, when I had that political trauma, while my eyes remained drawn toward politics, I quote him here, I was as if compelled to turn toward philosophy. And that's how we got Plato's system, isn't it? He made a great detour, as he says in the Republic. Well, I won't recount Plato's whole life, just enough to say that he founded a school, after his return from Sicily, by buying land in a district called Academos, and that's the origin of the term academy.
Raphael's painting: transcendence and immanence 9:09 And there he had disciples, and among his disciples was Aristotle. So much for the context. So maybe it's the moment to take a look at the magnificent slide Adrien prepared for you. It's a painting by Raphael, showing Plato and Aristotle talking, standing, walking down the stairs of the school, of the academy, surrounded by other studious disciples, some reading, others listening.
9:44 And it's famous, in Raphael's painting, isn't it? It's famous because Plato has an index finger pointing upward, and Aristotle has a hand held flat, pointing rather in the direction of the ground. So, that sums up the imagery a bit. Imagery is always a slightly pejorative word, meaning the idea that only holds up when you look at it from a distance anyway, of what distinguishes Plato from Aristotle: Plato would be in the world of ideas, of the beyond.
10:26 And Aristotle seems to say with his hand, let's not lose sight of the things around us, the immediate things, what Plato calls, with disdain, the sensible world, that is, the world that is the object of the senses. So much so that I've prepared a little scheme for you—I'll sketch this out. The first distinction is essence and substance, we'll comment on all that, right.
11:00 On Plato's side, there's transcendence, the finger pointed upward, trans, beyond—that's meta in Greek, trans in Latin, meaning beyond, right. When Christ says my kingdom is not of this world, in the Gospel, that means a religion of transcendence, as is often the case with monotheistic religions, right. Whereas among the Greeks, on the contrary, it's religions—and Aristotle is closer to the Greek world on this point—of immanence.
11:34 There's no God beyond, invisible, absolutely impossible to express, to depict. It's even forbidden to depict living beings already in the Islamic religion. So a fortiori God, right, who cannot be enclosed in an outline, in a silhouette. Except when he decides to become incarnate, as God the Son, as Christ—but watch out for this opposition, it's perhaps the most important one between Plato and Aristotle, transcendence in Plato and immanence in Aristotle.
12:14 So we'll speak of the transcendence of God or of the divine. God is a somewhat anachronistic notion for the time—let's say the divine among the Greeks—except that in Aristotle, the divine is right there, there, there, the way there are nymphs in springs. As they say the trees near Dodona, a small town in the vicinity of Athens, let escape words that are like prophecies carried by the wind. You see? Like the ocean, for us, is sodium chloride.
12:47 for the Greeks, it's the dwelling of Poseidon, whom the Romans call Neptune, right? There, with his trident, to connote the marine world. So there, the divine is there, we don't see it, but it's there, behind things—that's what immanent means, from the same root as maintaining what maintains itself right there, under the hand. So, another oddity—I did this on purpose in this little scheme, if you look at the third line, the Greek word eidos gives idea, practically the same word, eidos, idea—for 2500 years, the very same Greek word, eidos, when it's from Plato's pen, is translated as idea, and in Aristotle, as form.
13:42 So you see, I'm fine with opposing them, but in the Greek text, it's the same word. So, I'll focus more on Plato, to keep chronological order. You know, I like to quote—to introduce Marx, for instance, I like to use the famous 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—for reasons of time constraint.
The long detour of the Republic 14:30 If I may say so, I mean, when I try to do the work of transmission, of teaching, one always has the feeling one will never have time to unfold all the facets, all the aspects, all the subtleties of a given problem—so why do I favor this Marx text? Because, as I often say, it's the one with the most Marx in the fewest lines—it's a matter of saving time and optimizing the process of transmission a bit. So why this detour?
15:12 because I try to do the same with Plato, I try to find texts by Plato—so as not to talk behind his back—but that are vertical, meaning that contain more or less the essence of what we'll call, with more or less misreading, Platonism, or at any rate Plato's thought. So I take as an excerpt, for example, the last pages of the sixth book of his dialogue titled The Republic, a Republic which sets out, for the first time but not the last, in a more systematic way than elsewhere, how Plato envisions what is customarily called the ideal city—that is, proposing what the legislation of a city considered just by Plato would look like. So he begins, as all political discussions do, by asking: what would we do, what would we do about the distribution of wealth,
16:24 about the education of the guardians, the warriors—let's pass quickly over all that—we run into problems, everyone knows what a political discussion is like, and there's a crucial statement there that means that all of a sudden we leave café-counter politics behind and enter political philosophy, of which Plato's Republic is one of the first great titles, when Socrates says: my friend, you can see that to solve these problems we need to make a long detour—and that detour is the history of philosophy, this bracketing of the practical objective we had there—what would we do if we were in power tomorrow, you see, we put it in brackets because we're missing a great deal of information, that's a mark of humility—we need to make a long detour, this long detour that would have to be described, centuries later—what am I saying?—more than a millennium and a half later, by the pen of that immense philosopher, that immense mathematician, physicist
17:35 that Leibniz was, in the seventeenth century, who says this magnificent phrase which sums up rather well the relationship between the theoretical and the practical in the world of knowledge, namely: there is nothing concrete except through the abstract. I'll give an example to illustrate what Leibniz means here, in the direct line of Plato, the long detour—what Husserl, much later, in the twentieth century, the founder of the current called phenomenology—even though Hegel had already written, a century earlier, a first Phenomenology of Spirit, but when we say phenomenology without qualification, it's Husserl we mean—Husserl speaks precisely of this necessity we have to bracket, with the word epoché, a Greek word, meaning: I suspend my immediate relation to the practical aim I had, in order to try to learn more, to reflect—so I'm still commenting
18:48 on Plato's expression in the Republic: my friend, we need to make a long detour, as long as we're in philosophy—not wisdom, but the search for wisdom, hence in the lack of wisdom. I will never say it enough: it's not the money I have in my pocket or in the bank that I lack, it's the money I don't have—it's not my budget, it's what could increase it. So, if I'm a lover of wisdom, literally philosophia, it's because I don't possess it, and so there's a kind of anxiety immanent to philosophy, proper to philosophy, you see, not being too quickly satisfied with the certainties that clutter our thinking—including for myself, we are all cluttered with certainties, doomed to collapse sooner or later.
The allegory of the cave and the limits of the senses 19:58 and philosophy is another way of defining it, without taking the long road that leads from our starting certainties to truth—truth is quite different from our certainties. I wanted to make this detour on Plato, so I refer you to these last pages of the Republic, because there he gives us a diagram that sums up more or less his whole system—that's the end of the sixth book—now right after, I'll come back to this, but right after begins the seventh book, which begins immediately, from the very first lines, by presenting perhaps the most well-known passage in Plato, the most famous—the famous myth of the cave. That's why the end of the sixth book is so important, it prepares for the myth of the cave. I'll recall, for those who don't know the details, how this story of the cave is presented in Plato: imagine, he says to his interlocutors—it's always in dialogue form, right—imagine
21:09 a cliff that plunges into the sea—very Greek, all of this, right—and like a hollow in this cliff, there's a deep cave, and this cave is cut in two by a wall running crosswise, and to the right of the wall—so facing the back of the cave, with their backs to the opening, to the light, to the outside—there is a strange crowd of prisoners chained to one another. I'm laying out the account of the cave—it's an overstatement to call it a myth, it's an account, a parable, whatever you want to call it, mythology is closer to the religious. They're chained in such a way that they can only look toward the back of the cave, and they've been there, Plato specifies, since birth—meaning that since their birth, for them, existence, the outside world, is reduced to what one sees
22:19 on the cave wall. Now what do they see? Shadows. Why shadows? Well, because they're on the other side of the wall, but on the side facing outward there are strange figures parading by, carrying on their heads objects reproducing everything one can find in everyday life—things, animals, utensils, tools, silhouettes—and the fire, which is at the entrance of the cave, which is only the relay of the sunlight from outside, casts something like shadow puppets on the cave wall, something that vaguely recalls those objects passing on the outer side of the wall. Socrates' interlocutors say: what strange, what strange individuals—and Socrates specifies: it's us they resemble. Like that, it's clear, it's us, since our birth.
23:31 we're used to seeing only what's in front of our eyes and hearing only what our ears perceive. Well, yes, that's how it is—why does Plato hold that in contempt? It's proof that he's not a materialist. You know, the sciences of matter, physics in particular, are very, very far from what our eyes and ears show us. Take our ears—well yes, we perceive real sounds? No—the dog, the bat, perceive sounds that do exist, but we don't hear them; our senses are very, very limited. There are ultrasounds, as they're called, there are infrasounds, so low, right—that's how whales communicate over impressive distances underwater. And then there are ultrasounds, right, which allow, on the sonar principle, the bat to navigate even at great speed, not by its sight, which is poor, but precisely by its hearing, which is much more developed
24:41 than— anyway. So there, and you've all seen dog trainers who whistle—we hear nothing in that whistle, we don't hear that silent sound, but the dog hears it, because it's ultrasound. Which means our senses are always limited, with a lower bound and an upper bound, between what are called thresholds—thresholds of frequency. So, Plato knows all this well, and it's precisely so as not to confuse the real in its truth with the sensible. You see, we find again that whole distance separating certainty from truth. Take, to show what is unmoving, rest as opposed to motion—I can stamp on the ground and say, there, that's terra firma, that doesn't move, it's not like the flowing river or the wind. Ah, but I'll point out that this floor is actually hurtling along at 30 km a second, like everything on Earth, around the sun. Ah yes, but you can't see that with the eye—and it took millennia, you know, for people to figure that out, and not because people had
25:51 better eyesight that they realized this—because you can open your eyes as wide as you like, you still won't see the ground moving. No, no, it took a detour—what does Leibniz say? I repeat: there is nothing concrete except through the abstract, via the abstract, by the detour of the abstract, of mathematical equations. I'm always commenting on this very Platonic distance between sensible immediacy—the laziest thing there is, sensible immediacy—and effective reality, scientific reality, objectivity. I'll end with a simple reflection: the word 'sun' in every language—there's a word to designate the sun—it existed well before humans had any scientific theory of the sun. Neolithic hunters would tell each other, tomorrow at sunrise
27:01 we'll go chase the mammoth—there was a word for the sun, but they weren't concerned with knowing whether it was a little plate 20 cm across, a bit shiny in the sky, or whether, as the measurements show, it's more than a million and a half kilometers in diameter. Anyway, there was the word 'sun' well before there was any scientific theory of the sun. So everyday language, which philosophy calls into question with the Socratic question par excellence, reminds us of all that: what do you call...?
27:37 what do you call the sun? Is it this thing I see there that makes me blink a little because it dazzles me? Ah yes, so you could say it's as big as a 20 cm plate, and a plate that's also a lamp at the same time—yes, yes, fine, no matter. So the stars are little points of light in the sky, whereas some of these stars are 100 times bigger than the sun, which is already 100 times bigger than each of the planets around it, right?
28:08 never mind—but what do you call the sun, if it's to know what it is independently of us, objectively, scientifically, and not this thing that makes me blink—that speaks more about me than about the sun. You have to make a great detour, a great detour outside the senses—there was a theory, there was the word 'sun' well before there was a scientific theory of it. So, this end of the sixth book of the Republic, for Plato, to introduce the myth of the cave—let me go back a bit—establishes a hierarchy, right, of objects, from the most distant from true knowledge, the most doubtful, toward those closest to the truth, and he draws that famous line which runs from what will be, in the following book, the back of the cave, where there are only shadows, reproductions, reflections, simulacra—words that recur often in Plato—
Sensible knowledge and Descartes's doubt 29:18 and the first great break—that's sensible knowledge, what the senses show us, that's the back of the cave. You understand why they've been chained since birth, because we too, since our birth, began by trusting our senses. If you look at Descartes' first Meditation, much later, entitled 'Of the things that may be called into doubt,' taking stock of everything one can doubt—not at all because I, Descartes, am a skeptic and like to question everything, no, the opposite: it's because I want to arrive at something certain, indubitable, unquestionable—that's what 'no longer doubted' means—that I must begin by not, as they say in colloquial French, mistaking bladders for lanterns—you must begin by rejecting everything there's the slightest reason to doubt, as Descartes says. And he begins by saying: if I want to arrive at something
30:29 certain, I must begin sincerely with what I believed most assured—I quote him here—that is what comes to us from the senses, or through the senses. Yes, he begins like everyone else, and immediately he adds: but I have often noticed that these senses are deceptive, and it is the height of prudence never to trust those who have deceived us even once. If anyone hates being deceived, it's Descartes. And then, a small progression—he adds almost right away, this is another avatar of the distance Plato places between certainty and truth—he adds: yes, but after all, the senses deceive us regarding things that are far away—so I give an example, a rumbling I hear in the distance, since it's far off, I don't know if it's a plane, if it's thunder, or if it's a truck passing by—it's normal that I have doubts. But, says Descartes, I cannot doubt sensible things that are close at hand. Here, before me, there is a keyboard, here I am
31:41 talking about Plato and Aristotle in Adrien's company—I cannot, and how could I doubt—I quote Descartes word for word—'and how can I doubt that these hands writing and this body here are mine?' If I start doubting that, then I've gone crazy—that's my own addition, in more colloquial French—and he says so right away: unless I compare myself to those individuals whose brains are so clouded by the black vapors of bile, in the grip of madness, that they imagine themselves to be kings when they're stark naked, or that they have a body of glass or of clay—but come now, those are madmen, one would have to be mad to doubt that I'm here playing the piano and talking and being recorded. But come, those are madmen—I would be no less mad if I modeled myself on their example. So one might say, well, he quickly returned to sensory certainty. No—Descartes is a great thinker, full stop. However,
32:52 there is here something to be considered—I quote him word for word—that I am a man, and that consequently I am accustomed to sleep, and to represent to myself in my dreams, pardon, things just as extravagant, and sometimes even more extravagant, than these madmen do when they are awake. So how many times has it happened to me to dream that I was sitting here by the fire writing, when in fact I was lying naked in my bed—the dream argument makes him suddenly realize that there is no sensory criterion allowing us to distinguish waking from sleep, and I quote him once more, to conclude: so that I am quite astonished—in French, 'étonné' contains 'tonnerre,' thunder—I am quite astonished, and this astonishment is almost enough to persuade me that I am dreaming. When you read that, the real Descartes, in the text, you can never again say
34:02 Oh, he's Cartesian, that guy — that means he's the guy with his feet on the ground, who's square? No, no, quite the opposite. How far does Descartes go? All the way to asking himself what criterion he has to guarantee that he isn't dreaming right now — that I'm not transmitting philosophy hand to hand, that I'm actually asleep, stark naked in my bed. "But still, I see my grandmother." Yes, but I also see my grandmother in a dream, even though she's been dead for a long time, because grandmothers are perishable — I can no longer see her with my eyes. It's the same criterion as your sense-certainty: I see my mother in a dream and she isn't there, unfortunately. So, we're in Greece, so first the great blue sea, the cave.
The ascent, the intelligible world and dialectic 35:26 The opening should be a bit narrower, but never mind — here's the wall, that's the tricky part to draw. Here are the prisoners, here — you're looking at the back of the cave, here, right? And over on that side there are beings carrying things on their heads — let's put a flower here, here a fire, and here of course, the main one, the sun. We see it like that, there. I'm not the best draftsman
36:36 of my generation, far from it — but still, it's clearer this way, you see: we're in Greece, the sea, the sun, an opening in the cliff, a cave going down into it, a wall — I'm doing my best — that cuts the cave in two lengthwise, in depth if you prefer. Between the wall and the back of the cave, the famous prisoners — it's us they resemble, it's humanity, you can put thousands there if you like. And to the left, these mysterious beings carrying a sample of everything you can see in the outside world — I put a flower there because that's about the only thing I can still more or less draw. So you see, there's going to be a shadow of the flower projected onto the back wall, and they'll call "real" what is only the shadow, the reflection, far from the concrete reality — I don't know — of the objects that are behind their backs. And what is the act — because it is an act, not intellectual, not theoretical, it's practical — the act of philosophy is to detach oneself
37:48 from this community of people condemned to look in only one direction — and it's not the right one, it's the furthest from the models, isn't it, it's a relation of model to copy, all that — to detach oneself and climb this slope. And Plato insists — that's why I say "climb," I drew it as a slope, it's no accident, I try to stay close to the text — because your knee gets hurt, the slope is steep. And for Plato that means it's a suffering to see one's certainties collapse in order to move toward the truth. Look, when Galileo said that it wasn't us at the center but the sun, look at the trouble he had to face, isn't that so — and even he got off fairly lightly, but Giordano Bruno was burned in public for saying that there were many worlds like ours, isn't that so, the discourses on the plurality of worlds. And so he's going to climb this path that leads from shadows of shadows to the model
38:58 isn't that so, and from there, on the other side of the wall, begins what Plato calls — we'll see it in the text — discursive knowledge. It's basically about mathematics, geometry especially in Plato's time. So, that is to say, we no longer have to do with the sensible world — here we're right in the middle of Plato now, we're getting into it, because I was a bit laborious, a bit vague, in recalling the contexts; we need to be a bit more precise. It's easy: the sensible world is the one that is the object of our senses — it's not a privilege of man, the lowliest dog at the end of its nose has senses too, which also send it some messages from reality, isn't that so. Whereas on the other side of the wall there is what Plato opposes to the sensible world: the world he calls intelligible. That means it is not an object of the senses but an object of the intellect. Now be careful here, there's a lot of confusion — it doesn't mean a world that one can think about, like when I close my eyes
40:08 and I think about my sheet of paper — no, it's that these are things that can only be thought, which can never be seen — because the sheet of paper, I can see it and then I can think about it with my eyes closed. Whereas here it's a matter of intelligible reality — here we're right in the middle of Plato — things that can never be the object of a seeing but only of a conceiving. You'll say to me, but what is this thing, it doesn't exist, this is idealist stuff. Wait, wait, don't go too fast. How do you begin mathematics? By learning the point, the line, the straight line, a plane. Have you ever seen that with your eyes? Yes, yes, on the teacher's board. But that's a copy — the real circle mathematicians talk about is not at all the circle I trace with chalk, it's a set of points. The circle — show me a point with the eye, even the most fantastic microscope of all time, it will never be able to see a point. How could you possibly see something
41:18 that has no dimension and no thickness. Leibniz used to walk his students in the park to talk with them; he'd say to them: find me, in the whole park, among the hundreds of trees, there they are — find me two leaves that are equal. Whereas equality, which plays a crucial role — it's not in mathematical relations, what is an equation, just the root "equal" — it brings us back to equality, which is something that can be the object of a conceiving, never of a seeing. So let's see, continuing the progression — the progression from objects, from shadows of objects, from copies to the model, and from models toward the model of all models, the fire here being only ever a reflection of the sun — the ultimate truth is symbolized here by the sun, which is the origin
42:28 of all the things we see on the back wall of the cave. But Plato specifies that one must not, right upon leaving the cave, look straight at the sun — one would burn one's eyes. Yes, there are strange warnings — the eyes must first be accustomed to looking at the reflection of the sun in water. Yes, it's a cascade of copies and models to get to the sun. Why don't we stay with mathematics? Because with mathematics, that's it, we've become Platonists, we've dropped sensible things, we're finally dealing with the point, with the three that is three, that isn't three apples or three cherries or three shirts — what is three, there's nothing to see, you have to count. And why don't we stay with mathematics, why must we still make a great journey before arriving at the sun? And that's where Plato brings in what I indicated here, you see, dialectic — and here I quote him word for word — you will note, he says to his interlocutors
43:39 that the geometers proceed from hypotheses toward a conclusion — the hypotheses, the axioms, the postulates, the definitions, everything that's been called the first notions — you always have to start with notions everyone agrees on, a small number of statements that are not demonstrated but that serve to demonstrate everything else, which are called, in every case, postulates, more commonly axioms in the contemporary world, and of course definitions. One can begin by giving a definition of the circle — I'll only speak of the circle in the Euclidean plane, in what is called affine space — I call "circle" the locus of points equidistant, that is, at equal distance, from one and the same point called the center, in one and the same plane. Once I've given this definition, I only have to state the theorem: all the radii of a circle are equal, by definition — that's the case to say it, isn't it, since they are equidistant from the center. So then, why don't we stop there?
44:49 because, Plato says, the geometers proceed from hypotheses toward a conclusion, instead of rising up from hypotheses toward the unhypothetical principle. That's where the history of several series of metaphysics begins, in this crucial passage from Book Six of the Republic. So, with dialectic, an image you must never forget every time you think about dialectical terms, especially in Plato: when he says the spark, for it to spring forth, requires the friction of two stones — the spark doesn't come from one of the stones, the one in my right hand or the one in my left hand, but from their clash, from this opposition. That's dialectic — a beautiful image from Plato. And then there's the final term of the quest, after dialectic — so: opinion, the local gossip, the back of the cave, I'm summarizing a great deal — more serious, the intelligible world, which can never be seen but which can be conceived in mathematics, without the model
The good beyond the true and the return into the cave 45:59 then dialectic, and we finally arrive at the sun. And there, there is no more discourse, even dialectical — in the Greek text it's called, to those who keep watch, in a word of love, theoria, contemplation. Having arrived there — no, it's not over, far from it. We think this is the endpoint, but Plato first adds this: the sun, like light in general, of which the sun is a particular case — light is what allows the eye to see and the object to be seen. Do you agree that if I have an eye that is in excellent health, that functions very well, but there is no light, it's as if I saw nothing, it's of no great use to me — and in front of me there is an object in darkness that I don't see, that is there, that exists, but as long as there isn't a third term, which is neither me nor the object, but which is the light, allowing the eye
47:09 to see and the object to be seen — you see that dialectic is always ternary, I still see nothing — and he says the sun is here to symbolize what Plato mysteriously calls the Good. And here we are no longer in knowledge, in science, in knowledge, in learning — we've left opinion, that's good, we've left doubtful things — in knowledge the criteria are the true and the false, but not the good and the evil. That's not the business of physics. Good and evil are not the business of biology — there can be a diabolical biologist, and during the Third Reich there were plenty of people who were great scholars who were fervent Nazis, or who simply had sympathies for the regime — I'm thinking of one of the greatest physicists of all time and one of the founders of quantum theory, Mr. Heisenberg, who worked on the orders of the Nazi party, who did everything
48:19 so that the atomic bomb, the first one, would be German, and who got outdone by those who had fled Nazism and gone to the United States. So the goal of the quest for knowledge should be the absolute true — here the true — except that Badiou, who translates "the good" as "the true," which is the great misreading one can make of Plato — and the proof that what the sun adds, what it brings, is no longer a plus of knowledge but something else — and now I'll stop commenting and go back to restoring Plato's own words, as surprising as they may be: but you will note that the sun does not merely give the eye the possibility of seeing and the object that of being seen, but in addition, the sun gives beings growth and nourishment. The end of the quest, the goal, is a plus
49:32 yes, but a plus of happiness, of pleasure — it's not a plus of knowledge, of vitality — the sun gives beings, in addition, growth and nourishment. Is that the end? No, it's immense — we've only just finished the first half of the road. It's finished as far as the sun is concerned — we've now understood that it's not only the endpoint of knowledge, isn't it, but that it also has a function that, in Kantian terms, is not merely a theoretical object, it's a practical object, since it gives growth and nourishment. But it's not over, because he says: the prisoner who left the back of the cave and now finally sees the ultimate truths through the sun must go back down to convey to those who are still chained there that everything they see is false. So now there's a second, reverse path, where one must return — and we've moved from the theoretical world to the practical world
50:42 we've moved to the political. Plato — let's not forget this is taken from a dialogue titled the Republic, in which the point is to give the foundations of a just city, a laying-out of the political, which will never be done again with such radicalness until Rousseau's Social Contract, isn't that so. And he says quite rightly that at the beginning he will struggle — the slope is hard, I told you earlier, it hurts your knees, and besides he isn't used to the light, he's used to darkness, so he stumbles. And then when he comes back, says Plato, after having seen the ultimate truths, he will stumble again, but this time for the opposite reason — he is no longer used to darkness, he will stumble. The others will say: it was really worth going up there, this guy's a drunkard, just look at how he walks — he says, this is in Plato, I'm not inventing anything — and if they could seize him, they would kill him. "That's right," say his interlocutors. "It's true," he says
The Treatise on the Soul: the soul as living being 51:53 you can well imagine he's alluding to the death of Socrates, isn't that so. So there you have the full circuit, the going and the returning, isn't that so. So don't think we've made the full tour of Plato — we've seen the essential things, of course, but I'm not going to deploy the equivalent of what I've just said about Plato on the side of Aristotle, it would confuse you — there will still be much to read about Plato, I'm leaving that field, it happens to me, you know — and I'm going to take, well, let's have a look anyway at the title, in the foreground, because let's not forget these are works that have been commented on for 2,500 years, isn't that so — On the Soul. The soul, psyche in Greek, psukhê, which gives us psychoanalysis, psychology, the psychic, all that psy- root, that's the Greek name for the soul, psukhê. So there you see, there
53:04 you see the book — I skipped a third of it. Throughout that third, Aristotle doesn't set out what he himself thinks about the soul, he sets out — this is a great first among the manuscripts that have come down to us — the theories of his predecessors on the question, everything that, before him, the pre-Socratics, the Heraclituses, the Parmenideses, the Anaxagorases, etc., the Democrituses, have said about the soul. And it's only when we get to Book Two — look carefully at the title of the chapter — Definition of the Soul. Well, I won't go into detail about what Aristotle says, because once again we relied mostly on Plato this time, but I would simply like to give you a feel for Aristotle's manner, his approach. As much as Plato is an artist of thought, there's a theatrical, dramatic staging, since there's a dialogue between characters
54:14 here, no, it's firstly, secondly, thirdly. So one might say: Plato is the artist, Aristotle is the somewhat stiff, systematic guy. But no, that's an illusion — in fact, it's that we've lost Aristotle's dialogues. There were dialogues by Aristotle, which were highly prized in antiquity in his time — we've lost them, we're left with a few titles, we have no text. Plato is the opposite — we've kept his dialogues, that is, what he published, these so-called exoteric works, made for the outside world, the public — but we've lost his lecture courses, what Plato said to his students among themselves, what he initiated his audience into within the walls of the Academy. You see, one is the reverse of the other: for Aristotle we've lost his dialogues, his public works, and kept his lecture courses, hence the firstly-secondly-thirdly side, the abrupt, scholastic side — that's what we're going to see in the definition of the soul, you'll see it's very progressive. And Plato,
55:25 on the contrary, we've lost his lecture courses and kept these magnificent dialogues. So here's how the chapter on the definition of the soul begins: "Enough now about the traditional doctrines of our predecessors concerning the soul; let us take up the question again from the beginning, as it were, and try to determine what the soul is and what might be its most general definition." Now here I have to go back to my distinction between transcendence — what is beyond — and immanence — what is invisible but is there, there, there, which is not beyond, which is not behind, isn't that so. How do we know that this spring is beautiful — but for us this spring is H2O, it's water? No, no, for the Greeks of antiquity there are divinities in this water, there are nymphs, for example, like the daughters of the Rhine. So, an example
56:35 of immanence here — what is transcendent in Plato is immanent in Aristotle: "let us try to determine what the soul is and what might be its most general definition." I warn you — we come from a Christian civilization, whether one is an atheist or believes in God has nothing to do with what I'm saying — we come, from a cultural point of view, from a Christian civilization, so when we say "soul" among us, it's always opposed to the body, as is the case in Christian dualism — "whoever wants to save his life will lose it," I'm quoting passages from the Gospel, isn't that so, there are always antitheses, "the first shall be last," you know all that, "my kingdom is not of this world" — there's an opposition between what matters most and the world, between body and soul. Among the Greeks, the soul is not at all opposed to the body — the soul must be attributed to every living being, meaning that there is a soul. Now, you know, in Christian civilization
57:46 animals, things, don't have a soul. If you start saying that a stone has a soul, that a mountain does too, that means you're an animist, you'd have souls everywhere — but that's the pagans, that's not the Christians, you see what I mean, I'm not making a value judgment. It is always thus that the Greek world deliberately situates itself in the world of immanence, you see, of the divine which is not beyond but which, though not visible, is behind everything that is visible, here, here and now — that's why the Greek world is a dangerous world, and often a tragic one, because one can suddenly pass from the human world to the divine world without noticing it, and at that moment become guilty of a hubris, which requires a tragedy to purge — that's an Aristotelian term — to perform the catharsis, as he calls it, of the transgression of hubris. Let's not complicate things for now, just remember this: the soul that Aristotle speaks of, if you're ever unsure, replace it with "the living thing" — there is a fusion of psychology, the theory of the soul, and biology
58:56 everything that is alive has a soul, in the Greek world — there's even, in man, a soul of the liver, there are several souls in the body. There, let me make that point clear now — none of that gives us a definition yet, we've simply said that here the soul is not opposed to the body, that in the world of immanence, as soon as the body is animate, we're dealing with the soul. So, "one of the kinds of being, let us say, is substance" — and all of a sudden the notion of substance appears. You see, in Plato we have essence — essence, let's say we reflect on beauty, the beautiful — "what do you call beauty?" the dogmatist, I told you last time, the dogmatist will answer rather hastily: "beauty is the Parthenon," there, he points to the temple overlooking Athens. "Oh really?"
Platonic essence and Aristotelian substance 1:00:07 is the sunset not beautiful then? "Yes, yes, it's magnificent" — "but that has nothing to do with the Parthenon, why is there the same word for things that have nothing in common, neither for the eye nor for anything else?" "Yes, you're right..." It's annoying, Socratic questioning, but that's essence — what is this essence of beauty that can be embodied both in a sunset and in a well-built temple, in a beautiful actress or actor, or even in a beautiful piece of reasoning, as one says in mathematics — it happens, an elegant solution — a beautiful passion — that's essence, isn't it. And in Aristotle, it's not a matter of essence but of substance. So let's take a close look — "one of the kinds of being, let us say, is substance; now substance is" — look how systematic Aristotle is — "in a first sense, matter, that is to say"
1:01:18 that which in itself is not a determinate thing. We learn things with Aristotle — I take modeling clay, I make a giraffe, or a child more skillful than me — I'm bad at plastic arts — you recognize a giraffe with a long neck, very good, so to this matter the child has given a form. The matter-form couple is essential for understanding Aristotle, agreed — but as long it hasn't been given a form, the matter, a ball of modeling clay like that which doesn't represent any particular object, offers nothing of what he calls "determinate" — this time it's defined, it's determinate, it's a giraffe or an ox or a bird, whatever. "One of the kinds of being," I repeat, "let us say, is substance; now substance is," in a first sense — you heard it, we'll see others — "matter, that is, that which in itself," as long as one hasn't yet
1:02:28 given it a form, like the one who from modeling clay makes a giraffe, isn't that so, that which in itself is not a determinate thing — that's the first sense. "In a second sense," still substance, "it is the figure and the form," the opposite of matter — the figure and the form by virtue of which matter is then called a determinate being. "And in a third sense" — don't interrupt this extraordinary sequence — in the first sense it's matter, second sense the opposite, form, third sense, it's the composite of matter and form — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — isn't that beautiful?
The good beyond essence, concept and judgment 1:03:13 There, I wanted to give you this extract from the De Anima to show the gulf between Plato's stagings — while discussing, excuse me interlocutor — at a certain point, for example, I say this to lighten the mood, because I've asked you to make a bit of an effort at abstraction, to lighten things up but not to leave the essential — when we arrive at the sun, isn't that so, Plato tells us it's there to symbolize, in the visible world, what is in the intelligible world — but that we cannot see with the eye, or only with the eye of the soul — what the Good is. Let's not forget that we should think more of a suckling than of a knowledge — I say suckling like the baby who nurses at its mother's breast, for the sun gives beings growth and nourishment — I'm not joking, I'm not interpreting, I'm taking literally what Plato says — the nourishing father, the sun, that's what he tells us, all of it
1:04:26 about the end of the first half of the philosophical quest, the theoretical part before the practical part where one returns to the bottom — I don't want to repeat myself, but here's what I want to get to — I'm speaking here of Plato's art as a stage director — it's that his disciples say to him: but tell us what the Good is, if it's really the final stage and if at the same time it's the end of knowledge but also what gives nourishment, what is the Good? He says: but I can't answer you, because the Good is so lofty that it is beyond essence, that is, beyond words — and you understand a bit better now that essence is the right answer to the question "what do you call..." — it's the right word that makes this a donkey and that an ox, to the point that almost all of Plato's reflections, in nearly all his dialogues, bear on a concept, you see, an idea — for example, the Symposium, on eros, on love
1:05:36 the Gorgias discusses what oratory is, rhetoric, so important among the Greeks; the Cratylus, on words, on language — so Plato reflects each time on a concept, whereas Aristotle is a champion of judgment, that is, of a relation between concepts. Let me ask a small effort of you — it's very simple: a concept, "lion," the concept of lion, the animal lion, the species lion, everything I can conceive when I say "a lion" and not a cheetah or a cat — a lion, but if I just say "lion" plain, that's a concept. But if I say "the lion is a mammal," then I've put two concepts in relation, that of lion and that of mammal, and that's a judgment. Aristotle is going to be fascinated by this and will work in particular, in the syllogisms, on the notion of judgment, whereas Plato remains always fascinated, in language, by the function of naming — "what do you call...?"
1:06:46 I wanted to insist on this point, we'll have occasion to come back to it — for now I'm just sketching things out today, it's a bit thankless this evening because I'm sketching for you what is most general, hence least rich, in each of them — but well, it's in order to be clear. And so I still haven't illustrated the touch of humor I wanted to talk about: he says "I cannot speak to you about it, it's beyond words, but I can speak to you, if you like, about its offspring, the sun's offspring" — that is, its offspring, I like the image — that is, to make it more or less communicable, I have to find it an embodiment in the sensible world, and that will be the sun. And his disciples add — and here's the humor — "all right then, the offspring will do, another time you'll tell us the story of the father." You see, there, we have begun
1:07:56 here a reflection — I tell you, it's been 2,500 years that we've been oscillating, now toward Plato, now toward Aristotle. I remember a certain Mr. Belaval, a philosopher who taught at the Sorbonne, which was one of the principal chairs of philosophy in the sixties when I was a student, who said that these days — he meant in physics — we're witnessing a genuine resurrection of Platonism in quantum theory. You see, don't think these are dusty old treatises — it's Plato, Aristotle, 2,500 years, what does it matter to us? And as for one of the greatest mathematicians and logicians of the twentieth century — this time I'm leaving the philosophers — I'm thinking of Mr. Gödel, G-ö-d-e-l, that's pronounced "eu" in German, Gödel with an umlaut, Gödel who was the first to show
1:09:06 that mathematical discourse needed, each time, a metalanguage for its demonstration, and who was the first to state the incompleteness theorem, which I won't dwell on for now. And why am I telling you about this? For one very clear reason: he said that everything he had been able to read — and God knows he read a lot — everything he had been able to work through as a text on the philosophy of mathematics and of the sciences, amounts to nothing but footnotes to a Platonic dialogue — and that was written in the 1930s by one of the greatest contemporary mathematicians. There, let's leave it there for this evening — a Plato more of a mathematician, more turned toward the invisible, and an Aristotle more of a biologist, to the point that Aristotle, who had been the tutor, that is, the former teacher
1:10:16 of the child Alexander, Alexander the Great — Aristotle, when Alexander set off on his expeditions toward the East, toward India, toward Persia, and then really as far as India, Aristotle would ask that samples of plants and animals unknown in Greek geography be brought back to him from these far-off places. There, I'll end there for this evening, and I thank Laurence and others who are lurking a bit in their comments around this alternation of Plato and Aristotle, which has never ceased, for 2,500 years, to haunt what is most recurrent in the history of philosophy. Thank you, Adrien, thank you above all for your attention, and thank you in advance for the questions you ask — I've only answered a few this evening, but this is only the beginning of a great catching-up, God willing
1:11:26 as our African friends say — have a very good evening, and until next time
