English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Kant, the upper limit of bourgeois thought 0:00 Good evening everyone. I'm the first, sorry, to welcome you again lying down. That reminds me of a little anecdote, I'll tell you afterwards. The difference between lying down and bedridden. Yes, I'm undergoing physiotherapy treatment for my sciatica, which has now been properly identified.
0:38 It seems it's called a paralyzing sciatica. I have exercises to do, which I do regularly. There seemed to be some improvement, and then I had a sort of relapse since this morning. There, I'll stop with my old man's woes and tell you how grateful I am, generally speaking, for a long time now, for the comments you're kind enough to leave, to post in the comments.
1:15 On our videos, and in particular the last one, it seemed to me that I was a bit laborious, that it was a bit abstract, an introduction to Kantian epistemology, and on top of that I was lying down—there was nothing to be proud of in all that—and well, I'm surprised and very gratified by the kindness of your comments, not only their kindness, I mean, I'm not into...
1:46 Into sentimentality, but above all I notice that there is more and more a core, and even a bit more than a core, a group, let's speak French, of followers who are starting to see a little bit the systematicity of what I'm saying. Perhaps even—this is a modern philosophy idea—perhaps even they see the coherence of what I'm putting forward better than I do myself, since I'm sometimes caught up among the branches and the trees that keep me from seeing the forest.
2:27 So once again I am very, very grateful to you; I won't read them to you because, I mean, there are praises that sometimes make me blush. On the other hand, I'm going to begin introducing, next, my account of an important part of the Kantian contribution to philosophy, that is, the last stage of bourgeois thought, we could say. There's no other kind of thought. I'm opening a parenthesis, but I mean, take a literary history of French literature, for example, from the end of the Middle Ages to the present day—I'm not saying I'm excluding medieval literature, but it's very complicated.
3:28 And above all these are very, very long periods. But otherwise, the 16th century, the Renaissance, the 17th century of classicism, or the Grand Siècle, the 18th century of the Enlightenment, etc. Most of the authors who matter—find me an aristocrat in there. Not to mention peasants. They were illiterate until a very recent period. So practically everything that matters was a thought that, between the aristocracy and the peasantry, there was the bourgeoisie, right?
4:10 But it's not in the pejorative sense it can have when it is in power and positions itself against the working class and the proletariat, as the aristocracy did against peasant revolts, against jacqueries. But that's not today's subject. Kant is the most... We could say that's where bourgeois thought reaches its upper limit, how far it can go.
4:47 I remind you of Clouscard's quip—those who listen to me know well that it's in these quips that Clouscard is sometimes at his most profound—where he said "Kant saw everything, but then immediately drew the curtain." That sums up very well what Kant brings and what he does not bring. So now I'm going to read you an excerpt from his last great work, the Critique of Judgment, or in other translations the Critique of the Power of Judgment, which has historical importance, I mean in the history of philosophy, insofar as it is the first time there is a systematic aesthetics developed, a philosophical one I mean.
A critical comment: the alleged materialist dilemma 5:33 But before that, I would still like to comment—I told you—comment on a comment, but precisely not among those praising me, even if it's a very courteous one, but a critique. And it will let us set things straight regarding notions like positivism, philosophies of nature, the human sciences—for all that Kant is quite valuable—and materialism, and so on.
6:18 So I'll first read the comment: you seem to be in a dilemma. A dilemma is what it is. If I go left, there's a lion, if I go right, there's a bear or a panther, so I mean, I'm stuck between two dangers. Between Charybdis and Scylla, as we sometimes say, right? You don't want to subscribe to crude materialism.
6:52 So he says "crude." You know that since Marx, we speak of mechanistic materialism. That, in particular, of certain... a thinker of the 18th century, materialist, like La Mettrie, like Diderot and many others, materialist, atomist, empiricist. Last time I told you that if you want the best presentation of this 18th-century thought in broad outline, in a very clear and at the same time quite profound text, it's the preface or introduction, the preliminary discourse to the Encyclopédie of d'Alembert.
7:50 D'Alembert is a great mathematician, well known in the history of mathematics, but we sometimes forget that it is he who wrote what serves as the preface or introduction to that huge work of the Enlightenment, this immense collective work to which Diderot devoted a whole part of his life, and where, for example, someone like Rousseau wrote the entry on music. Diderot said to Rousseau: you'll take care of everything related to music because I don't know much about it.
8:21 And there you have the best exposition of what our interlocutor—his handle is Alouf le Givre, if I'm not mistaken about his name, because my eyesight is failing—calls, as is customary, mechanistic materialism, of course, not yet dialectical, which is the core of Marxist thought.
8:57 Now, I'll go back to his comment without stopping: you seem to be in a dilemma. You don't want to subscribe to crude, scientistic 19th-century materialism—he gives a good illustration, saying, in quotes, the famous formula, "the brain secretes thought," you see, materialism, the brain secretes thought, like the liver secretes bile, you see. So you don't want to subscribe—well, there I agree with him, I don't want to subscribe to that kind of materialism, because it can be very effective in the natural sciences—I'm getting ahead of my reading of Kant in a moment—but you also don't want, it's a dilemma, you also don't want to give up Marxist materialism—he should say dialectical materialism—which claims that thought is nothing but, and when someone says "nothing but," they're making a reduction, the reflection of the movements of matter.
10:08 Now indeed, Marxist theorists, from Marx to Lenin, via Engels, often use this notion of reflection. You'll see why I don't quite say the concept of reflection. So you found this way out, that matter could well be something other than what common sense tells us it is. Than what common sense tells us it is. That's the exact text of our friend.
10:42 So why not the mind while we're at it? Next, to affirm that the subject is activity is to affirm that it is not only matter but also movement, in short that it is animated. And I think I'm staying within the coherence of this comment. To be animated is literally, to the letter, the etymology of the word. Anima is soul in Latin. If it is animated, it has a soul, so there isn't only matter.
11:16 Now, it's interesting because, far from there being a dilemma, he says "you don't want to subscribe to crude materialism?" I'm not a crude or mechanistic materialist, indeed, nor a scientistic one, but it's not that I don't subscribe to it. I say that it's valid, but in a well-defined field, as long as we limit ourselves to the so-called sciences of nature.
11:56 Physics, chemistry, biology, with all their subdivisions, whose progress is far from slowing down. Even if our era hasn't yet seen the revolutions we saw at the beginning of the 20th century, like the emergence of relativistic physics—I'm thinking of Einstein of course—or quantum physics.
12:28 I'll ask this question—it's not my field, so I ask questions of someone who works at CERN in Geneva, one of my friends who's a great researcher. I told him, maybe I'm saying nonsense, but it seems to me that I don't currently see upheavals in the fundamental concepts. Every day there are extraordinary discoveries in applications, in technology, in whatever you like. But in the identification of fundamental concepts, mass, energy, etc., there doesn't seem to be great progress compared to the fecundity of that great period at the beginning of the 20th century, which saw the successive emergence of Einstein's theory of relativity, in particular with the equivalence of matter and energy, and then afterwards quantum theory, with the limits it imposes on objective knowledge.
13:40 But so, it's not that I've done... I don't mean I refuse to subscribe to it, I do subscribe to it, but I dispute its totalitarian pretension to also want to explain a line of Racine, the appearance of the Muslim religion in the 6th century, or whatever.
14:12 In short, in the domain of... the so-called human or social sciences. However far back we go in history, we have never seen a human individual who did not develop within a social framework, within some collective, whatever it may be. First correction. So I don't say, of course, I refute that the brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile.
Reflection, empiricism, and the confusion between matter and the sensible 14:45 But you also don't want to give up Marxist materialism, which nevertheless claims, he has Marx say, that thought is nothing but, I quote, the reflection of the movements of matter. That's what I told you is reductive, as if it were a trivial thing—that's where our friend doesn't see the complexity there is in the notion of the concept of reflection. There I'm also addressing my Marxist comrades, who often don't perceive this complexity and who, by doing so, justify this criticism.
15:16 As a mechanistic conception of reflection. Which I sum up with the phrase, the fundamental statement of all empiricism—I won't go back over it, last time we saw that empiricism comes from empeiria, which means experience, going around, peri, peripheral, perimeter. Namely, Nihil est in intellectu, quod prius fuit in sensu. I mention this because it was a very... it was an important formula in scholastic thought at the time, Latin was spoken in the Middle Ages, which we translate as: there is nothing in the mind that did not first pass through the senses.
16:03 So our thought is preceded—before it does not first—it is preceded by our contact with matter, which is the sensible. Here again there's a lot of confusion. So you found this way out, that matter could well be something other than what common sense tells us it is. But no, it's not me who, because I'm in a dilemma, finds a way out. It's any scientist, any physicist, chemist, who will be the first to tell you that...
16:39 Being a materialist, fine, if that suits you, why not, but don't confuse matter with what is the object of our senses, with the sensible, to speak as Plato did 25 centuries ago already. The sensible world, the world with which we are in contact thanks to our senses. The world revealed by our touch, our sight, our hearing, and so on.
17:19 So, a big confusion. As I once told you, I can stamp the ground with my foot as much as I want, saying this doesn't move, this is solid ground. It's not like a ship sailing or a plane moving. This ground, which he says doesn't move, is in fact moving, like the whole Earth around the sun, at 30 km a second. 30 km a second. So it was necessary, on the contrary, to fight against sensory evidence—I'm being careful with my words now—evidence, in the word "évidence," look closely, look at the root, it's vidéo, that is, what I see. Nothing is more deceptive than appearances.
18:04 And those who confuse Marx with mechanistic materialism should reflect on this fine phrase of Marx's: "If the essence and the appearance of things coincided, all science would be unnecessary." You wouldn't need to make the effort of scientific research, it would suffice to open your eyes and pick up out of the gutter what's called reality. No, that's not reality, that's not objective reality. It's not reality, and still less the truth of discourse relating to reality.
18:34 Nothing is more deceptive than our beginnings in the world. And our beginnings—when we're a baby and all that, we only have our senses, of course. And I remember that when I was a kid, my sister showed me the starry sky at night, my older sister. I was really small, a little tyke. And she said to me, you see those stars, I said yes, those little points of light, she said no, they're not small, they're bigger than the whole Earth. I thought she was pulling my leg, you see.
19:05 But yes, but what I see isn't gigantic things, is it? They're little points of light. In fact, in antiquity, quite a few people thought these points of light were as if we were inside a big colander, you know? Like letting salad drain, you see, a strainer, and behind it is the empyrean, that is, the great divine light, and a bit of the light behind it reaches us through these little holes.
19:36 You see that the senses spend their time deceiving us. Last time I gave this example: this is matter, it's solid. No, there's infinitely more, almost infinitely more void in it. The distance between atoms and within atoms. In short, there's much more void than matter. There you go. So, precisely because I needed to correct this, I thank him for his intervention, which allows me to clarify these things.
20:14 You found this way out, that matter could well be something other than what common sense tells us it is. Science spends its time saying that matter is quite other than what common sense—that is, someone who's content with seeing, with listening—tells us. I've already told you about those astrologers of antiquity who thought that by climbing a 15-meter tower they would better understand astronomy. See the rings of Saturn—something anyone, even with fairly powerful binoculars, you don't even need a telescope, you can see the rings of Saturn.
Reason sees only what it itself produces 20:54 There we go. This intervention allows me to make the transition, to clarify these notions in which you see we easily get mixed up, the transition between Kant's work, from which I read you an excerpt, which is nothing other than the preface to the second edition, with that striking passage, where Kant takes up the problem of the sensible by saying reason sees—yes, that does seem like, apparently it's the eye—sees only what it produces itself.
21:31 It's not a seeing with the eye, it's a seeing with thought, with statements, with demonstrations, of which mathematics is the finest example. I don't know—it's by taking a detour. The sensible is our immediate relation to reality. But science began when we got out of this immediacy, when we lift our head out of the water, so to speak, and we finally see that the world is not as the fish sees it, that we've come out of immediacy and made a great detour through theoretical rigor, through the world of logical-mathematical statements.
22:15 In short, there are those who begin with... with what the senses show them, they call that facts, as if they were facts. And that's empiricism, whereas rationalism—ratio simply means reason, implying reasoning—rationalism begins not with facts but with statements, with fragments of discourse.
22:46 Ah, these aren't the statements of the corner café, we agree on that. We begin with statements that are the foundations of what follows will demonstrate. That's why all theoretical thought, even a mathematical theory, always begins with a very small number of undemonstrated notions, which are therefore called first notions—I'm being precise about my vocabulary—from which one will try to derive as many propositions as possible, provided one shows that they don't contradict these first truths, if you prefer.
23:30 The main rule of the game being that there should be a minimum of first notions, because if you grant yourself, without demonstration, a whole lot of propositions, that's really the opposite of rigor. So the power of mathematics... is to have very few propositions at the start, but with those to demonstrate practically everything around us. Let me give you an example of this, from the theory of natural whole numbers.
24:04 It's really only formalized—we've known numbers for a long time, for centuries—but it's only been formalized since the contemporary period, in particular since an Italian named Peano stated the four or five axioms, I'll check with you, which alone suffice to rigorously found the theory of natural whole numbers.
24:35 Here are these axioms. First, every number has a successor. I don't know if I'm stating them in order, but I am sure of this: every number has a successor. 2 has 3. A successor called 3. Every successor of a number is a number. Zero is not the successor of any number. Here we are dealing with natural whole numbers, so we assume we don't know about negative numbers.
25:15 There, I must be forgetting one or two, but these few small statements suffice to found the extraordinary set, infinite in quantity, of natural whole numbers. So I repeat: the empiricist begins with things, what he calls things, with immediate knowledge, which means the sun is quickly seen, it's a little plate 25 cm in diameter that you shouldn't look at for very long because it dazzles me.
25:50 Whereas the rationalist begins with statements. I'm not saying one should skip experience altogether, including sensory experience. But science was built when, after making this detour through the rational and the chain of statements, the logical, non-contradictory chaining of statements, one can return to experience to see what corresponds to what one has just constructed, which is quite different.
26:21 And this is the famous passage, right now I'm in the recap of last session, this famous passage where we have to say, where Kant says, reason must appear before nature, well, back to experience, holding its principles in one hand and the experience imagined according to its principles in the other, but not as a pupil who lets the master say whatever pleases him—it's not up to the external world to tell us what to think, because in my view it doesn't speak anyway, so it's in no danger of thinking—but like a judge sitting on the bench who forces witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.
27:04 That's where we see that the world has a bit of time. Reason sees only what it itself produces. It must first work before it can gain knowledge of the external world. And so, in this first great work—because he also wrote shorter pieces—of Kant's, which is the Critique of Pure Reason, which gives, broadly, the foundations of scientific thought up to today.
27:40 Kant says enough there to account for what, in his time, manifests itself through Newton's system, which is the apex of classical physics—that is, of the physics that still holds good today, mind you, but which was modified, as I told you, from the beginning of the twentieth century, and which has to be modified as soon as the objects we're talking about start approaching the speed of light.
Logic of objects, logic of the subject; Kant's two domains 28:15 So I'm not sweeping aside with the back of my hand what he calls "beta materialism"; I confine it, I circumscribe it—so it holds within that set I call the sciences, or if we were really speaking in philosophical language I'd say, within this science that uses the logic of objects of the world.
28:45 The object, the obstacle, is everything that stands before us. That's where the word "obscene" comes from, if you look closely. It's what shows itself on stage and what should never appear on stage before all the spectators. Whereas philosophy begins, from its origin—I remind you that I'm speaking of philosophy in the strict sense, not of thought in general, which is far earlier than Socrates, than the Greek world, and which began in the East.
29:17 Well before the Greece of Plato. But philosophy in the strict sense, on the other hand, which Socrates inaugurates, is when his question concerns less the things we see, that we hear, than the discourses by which we designate those things. These are reminders... To the point that the decisive question is no longer "what is it" but "what do you call it?"
29:51 So this philosophy, which began not with the logic of objects but with the imperative inscribed on the pediment of the temple of Delphi, of the oracle—know thyself. And there we move to the logic of the subject, the subject that is in each of us, the subject that Descartes, fifteen centuries after Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—fifteen centuries later—Descartes opens up so-called modern philosophy by basing everything on the cogito, which is the first person singular of the verb cogitare in Latin, cogito, which simply means "I think." That is a subject that thinks, not a pebble.
30:43 Now, I'm not saying that there exists a thought without matter—don't make me say that, quite the contrary. But then, to clarify all this, this very distinction between these domains, as I was saying, I confine it, I restrict it to a field. Now I'll speak in Kantian terms, that is, in terms of "domain." And for that, I'll take a difficult text, part of which I'll read to you, somewhat clearer than the rest, but which is probably Kant's most profound text.
31:20 His Critique of Judgment, I remind you, I repeat again, which is often translated as Critique of the Faculty of Judging. In German it's Urteilskraft—Kraft is the force of, the faculty of, the power of judging. So an excerpt from the introduction, his introduction, where Kant tries to give something of a summary of the advances he's made since the Critique of Pure Reason, passing through the Critique of Practical Reason, which I'll speak of little for now.
32:01 And without further delay, now I'll read you how he sums up this account. And you'll see right away the connection with my own introduction. Our cognitive faculty as a whole—so here he's not talking about the natural sciences or the human sciences, but as a whole—possesses two domains: that of the concepts of nature and that of the concept of freedom.
32:36 It legislates, our cognitive faculty, it legislates. To legislate is to create laws, to find laws. When Newton says that all bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance—that is, in a sentence a line and a half long, it accounts for almost the entire motion of the universe, at least, I repeat, as long as bodies aren't moving too fast, too close to the speed of light—the power of the human mind captures, in a line and a half, even what holds true in galaxies we'll never reach. So there's no risk of us experimenting on them.
33:17 "Our cognitive faculty as a whole possesses two domains, that of the concepts of nature and that of the concept of freedom." Let's explain this. "It legislates indeed a priori"—meaning without recourse to experience, for now—"by means of these two kinds of concepts. Philosophy is therefore likewise divided, in accordance with this faculty, into theoretical philosophy"—that's for the concepts of nature—"and practical philosophy."
33:48 Traditionally, in the history of teaching philosophy, we commonly distinguish the philosophy of knowledge—here theoretical philosophy—and the philosophy of action. This is not "practical" in the technical-practical sense, not practical in the sense of the latest gadget you find on a supermarket shelf, the one that tells you it's practical—easy, clean, quick, and efficient. No, no, it's practical in the sense that the subject is no longer in a relation of knowledge to the world around him.
34:27 He's not just seeking to know, he wants to transform it, he wants to act. That's what "practical" means, isn't it? The concept of praxis, for example. Philosophy is therefore likewise divided, in accordance with this faculty, into theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy. But, says Kant—watch out, because when you say "but," it means that up to now things were roughly clear, now watch out, we're problematizing, and that's the most important part of a philosophical discourse, when it starts to problematize.
35:04 The territory on which it—our cognitive faculty, the subject from the start—but the territory on which it establishes its domain and on which it exercises—the term is italicized—practically, exercises, transforms, its legislation, is always only the sum of the objects of all possible experience. Watch out, Kant is rigorous in his manner of speaking, even though, as you know, it's very difficult with everyday language, which wasn't made for knowledge in the first place, but was made for hunting, fishing, gathering. Watch out, there are three bison over there.
35:53 So when he says "the sum of the objects of all possible experience," pay close attention to "possible." That is, there are things that, even before experience, we know are impossible. Mathematicians know very well that when studying a function, if it's a function involving a fraction, a ratio, call it what you like, the denominator must absolutely not be zero, because that's impossible.
36:28 So if I tell you, imagine a castle with 1,500,000 rooms—that doesn't exist. So there I'm not speaking of the real, but there's nothing impossible about it. It's a problem. There's nothing that materially contradicts the laws of matter, right? When I say a castle of 1.5 million rooms, that may contradict my financial means, fine, but it's certainly not a material contradiction.
Possible experience, phenomenon, understanding and reason 37:00 "But the territory on which it establishes its domain and on which it exercises its legislation is always only the sum of the objects of all possible experience." I'm interrupting—but yes, I'm not here to read books to you, you can do that without me—I'm interrupting to draw your attention to the geographical metaphors that suddenly appear. Kant is a contemporary of the last great explorers of the planet, a contemporary of Bougainville, of Cook the Englishman, who discovers the southern world, Oceania, Australia, things like that.
37:39 This is during the eighteenth century, in his time. There remain many unexplored patches afterward, but still, you see. And so it's interesting to see these geographical notions, concerning space, like domain and territory. So now that I've drawn your attention to this aspect, let me reread this paragraph without stopping and continue. Our cognitive faculty as a whole possesses two domains, that of the concepts of nature and that of the concept of freedom. It legislates indeed a priori by means of these two kinds of concepts. Philosophy is therefore likewise divided, in accordance with this faculty, into theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy.
38:31 But the territory on which it establishes its domain and on which it exercises its legislation is always only the sum of the objects of all possible experience. You saw last time that for hearing a sound to be possible, it must occupy a certain duration. Even if it's a millisecond, I don't care, down to the imperceptible. But for it to be perceptible, it must occupy a duration.
39:09 And so this duration unfolds within a parameter called time. So already, what Kant calls "the sum of the objects of a possible experience" is what he's going to define, in his vocabulary, as what we call the phenomenon. And there it's no longer only a matter of nature—this lamp, which has nothing natural about it, which is an artifice, an object of art in the ancient Greek sense, techné, that Greek word for art—not art in the merely aesthetic sense. No, that's not it.
39:40 It's everything that's concentrated in the root of the word "artificial" as opposed to "natural." This lamp unfolds in space, otherwise I couldn't perceive it. So there are conditions for the possibility of an experience. I continue, as I told you. Legislation by concepts of nature is carried out through the understanding and it is theoretical.
40:15 Let's sum up the terms precisely. Legislation by natural concepts—the Greek term for nature is phusis, physis, p-h-y-s-i-s, at least when transcribed into our alphabet. And so, translate that as "physics." And it's immediately much clearer. Legislation by natural concepts—that's all the laws physicists establish—is carried out through the understanding and it is theoretical. Legislation by the concept of freedom is carried out through reason and it is simply practical.
41:06 Right. I warned you the text is a bit arduous, but you won't regret it, you'll see. By the way, I was saying earlier that we have to go out, that science begins when we leave immediate knowledge behind. There's Leibniz, the seventeenth-century philosopher, who has this magnificent line, isn't it—and he's also one of the greatest mathematicians of all time and knows what he's talking about: "There is nothing concrete except through the abstract." You have to make a detour through the abstract to arrive at the concrete.
41:40 You have to have lined up a good many equations before you can speak of the sun as anything other than saying it's a disk like this, that turns around us, as we used to believe. I'll pick up this beginning of the paragraph again and continue. Legislation by concepts of nature is carried out through the understanding and it is theoretical. Legislation by the concept of freedom is carried out through reason and it is simply practical. Now there you see there's a crucial distinction between understanding and reason, two very distinct, even opposed, faculties in Kant.
42:17 The understanding is that part of our thought at work, for example, in the sciences. So, then. The understanding is what reasons like this: if... then. You already see that this isn't immediate knowledge. I need to know the "if," the initial hypothesis, in order to be able to say a "then," a conclusion. It's the complete opposite of immediate thought, it's a perpetual mediation. It's by means of my hypothesis that I arrive at this conclusion.
42:54 But why does he say "it is simply practical"? Here we need to give a bit of imagery to put flesh and blood on what seems quite abstract. But that's precisely why I told you the game is worth the candle, meditating on Leibniz's sentence, there is nothing concrete except through the abstract. If you want the true concrete, and not the flashy thing that wants to pass for concrete and is only the sensible, you need to make a detour through the abstract. To give us a rest from this detour that you're kindly willing to let us take together, I'll take an example.
The helicopter over the Amazon and the African hearth 43:35 I'm thinking of the many newcomers, which delights me both by their presence and by their comments. I take a helicopter, I fly over the Amazon. You can imagine what I see when I lean over to look at the scenery below. And it's been like that for an hour, what's called the canopy. You only see the tops of the treetops. There's a dome of trees of a forest that goes all the way to the horizon. Oh yes, there are those who think there's no more forest.
44:11 It's the largest forest that exists on the planet. And after that, there's the Congolese forest. There are even still tribes there, to use the common term, small groups of people who have never yet been approached by the rest of humanity. To show the immensity of this forest—for now I'm not concerned with those people, I'm only concerned, on the contrary, with nature. I see the treetops, the treetops.
44:45 When the helicopter descends a bit lower, I see that there are monkeys running from one treetop to another, and flowers, whatever you like. Everything I see there—and now you understand better what Kant is saying—can very well be explained, after the wonder. The wonder is something else, but if we want to understand everything we see, we have to refer to what are called the sciences of nature. Biology, botany, physics, climatology—that's enough to account for everything that's there.
45:18 And that's the understanding at work. But suddenly my helicopter arrives over a large clearing where I see, on the left, the men's huts, on the right, above, the women's huts, and in the middle, I don't know, say a fire, for instance, around which they gather at night. And I've often seen that in Africa. And yes, I say to myself—a parenthesis.
45:49 It's moving to think that out in the countryside, you're walking with someone who lives nearby, a local farmer as we say in French, and I ask him, are there still houses down there at the bottom of the valley? He says yes, there are two or three fires, meaning houses where there's a family, a fire, a hearth. You imagine a chimney with people in the evening telling each other things. So the hearth there is the very heart of the inside of the house.
46:19 And that's what's moving—that in Africa there's so little in the houses, there isn't much in the huts, how could there be. Some gris-gris under the bed perhaps, because there's always something sacred, a mat, a small mattress, a few clothes, and so what's called the hearth there, it isn't inside, it's outside, it's at the center of the village, and it isn't individual—it's not the house within its walls, it's the collective.
46:53 There, I'll close this little parenthesis. But so, suddenly I see something—that's really where I leave behind materialism, what our interlocutor called "beta," or mechanistic to be more precise—that is, these things, everything I see there, and all the more so when I go down and talk with the people who are there, I'm going to learn incredible things, things that—not that we haven't yet managed to explain them—will never be explained by the sciences of nature, which doesn't mean they're inexplicable, but it takes another logic than the logic of objects.
Prohibition of incest, fasting, and the law one has prescribed to oneself 47:33 I'm thinking, for example, of the prohibition of incest. Consult any anthropologist, right, who specializes in a particular geographic field, like Oceania—that's the case with Frazer, for instance, one of the great classics of anthropology—or the Amazon, I'm thinking of Lévi-Strauss, there—and then Africa, it'll come back to me, there's an excellent one, anyway.
48:07 All anthropologists will tell you that every human society practices the prohibition of incest, forbids incest. Of course, not always with the same configurations. To be precise, a first cousin here might be allowed, there it will be forbidden. On the other hand, there are constants in every society. What's always forbidden is the sister, the mother.
48:44 So you'll say, I don't see how that contradicts the laws of nature. There's a natural repulsion toward incest. You know, when people start saying something is "natural," you have to look closely. When you say a sentence as common as, and that nobody finds strange, like "Listen, it's natural for me to go to the movies on Saturday night"—neither the movies nor the institution of Saturday as a day off is natural. Here "natural" means "leave me alone, I have the right to..."
49:15 That has nothing to do with the nature of physicists. Watch out for these slips in meaning. So let me go back. If there were a repulsion—Lévi-Strauss has a beautiful passage on this, particularly in his doctoral thesis, titled The Elementary Structures of Kinship. You see, kinship—we're not far from the problems of incest. He says very well: there's no human law that forbids you from leaving your hand motionless on a lit fire.
49:52 No need for a law there—you pull your hand away fast. You see? If there's a law forbidding something, it's because there's something people want to do. So let's not speak of a natural repulsion toward incest. Just look at the animal world and you'll see that it practices incest routinely. Incest is not at all anti-natural. The Australians—well, the colonists of English tongue who populated Australia, after having nearly exterminated the populations that were there, particularly in Tasmania—decided that the savages, meaning those who flee, well, because when they see us arriving, they have a few reasons to flee.
50:39 Yes, we, the democracies who stand opposed to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, we are historically the kings of extermination—not you, not me, not Adrien, maybe him, the animal—she, sorry. So, that being understood, there is, then, a kind of legislation that proceeds from other things. Watch out, I'm not just saying it's different from natural legislation—it's opposed to it.
51:17 When I keep Lent at Easter, that's for Christians, when I do Ramadan, that's Muslims, when I fast, well the longest fasts are those of the Buddhists or of Hinduism, isn't that so? Try to deduce fasting from a natural impulse. The natural impulse is to be hungry and to eat when one can. It is not to fast voluntarily. So what is properly human is to oppose the natural impulse. And let us never forget the sentence from Rousseau in The Social Contract.
51:53 The impulse of appetite alone is slavery. Obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself — not that someone else prescribed for me, that would be dictatorship — obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom. And yes, freedom doesn't mean I obey nothing and no one, but it means arranging things so that I obey myself when I obey someone else. How is that possible? Well yes, isn't that so? If I vote — and that presupposes the institution of democracy, it presupposes revolutions, it presupposes great historical upheavals.
52:39 But there we are. When we get used to it, we end up believing it's natural. That's why I recall what underlies all this. It's because I approve the law for which I voted that when I obey it, I obey myself. To the point that Rousseau justifies rebellion when that law is violated, precisely.
Two legislations on the same territory: the forest and the field 53:09 All this to get you used to these Kantian divisions. There is legislation by nature on one side, so the sciences of nature. All sciences enact laws, all applied sciences. Heat expands bodies. That's valid everywhere, including on the star Sirius, where neither you nor I will ever set foot — unless we travel for a few million light-years.
53:39 Yes, past a certain age, everything falls apart, I'm sorry. De Gaulle used to say old age is a shipwreck. So, things will be clearer now after these little detours and these Amazonian examples. Legislation by natural concepts — all those that can explain the growth of a tree, for example — is carried out by the understanding; the legislation is theoretical.
54:16 That means it allows me to increase my knowledge. Legislation by the concept of freedom — thou shalt not marry thy mother — is carried out by reason and is merely practical. It is only in what is practical that reason can legislate. As regards theoretical knowledge of nature, reason, starting from the laws given to it through the understanding, can only draw conclusions by reasoning that remain always on the level of nature.
54:51 Conversely, where there are practical rules — the highway code, for instance — reason does not therefore legislate, for these rules may be technical-practical ones. The understanding and reason thus have two different legislations. Listen carefully: we began by distinguishing two domains, the domain by nature and the domain by freedom. And now he says the understanding and reason — the understanding in the domain of nature and reason in the domain of freedom — thus have two different legislations, but over one and the same territory of experience. Now that's a new step.
55:32 For there to be a field, to make the forest that was there disappear, or to drain the marsh that was there, work is required. For the one to be, the other must not be. There we are no longer in dialectics, by the way.
56:05 But in both cases, whether it's a field — that is, something that is not natural, that is supernatural as I like to say, but I'm playing on the word on purpose so it's not confused with mysticism or religion, I do say, which I respect, but I do say that it's supernatural in the sense that it's not natural. So if we don't want to just play around, we're going to make things. A value judgment, as there is in the prefix 'super,' above — I say which is not natural, which is artificial. That's what a field is. It's not a natural meadow.
56:39 So suddenly we see things here. That means the two are fighting over the same territory. That place where the forest was, there is now the field, but it's the same place — that's it, that territory of which we saw earlier that the a priori frameworks are time and space. Broadly, science has an infinite domain before it, but one that is valid only insofar as there is the spatio-temporal framework.
Two determinations in the same subject: the meal is an institution 57:13 Indeed, the concept of nature has as little influence on legislation by the concept of freedom as the latter troubles the legislation of nature. The Critique of Pure Reason — he's alluding to the work he had published previously, whose preface I read to you last time — the Critique of Pure Reason demonstrated the possibility of thinking, at least without contradiction, the coexistence of the two legislations and of the faculties pertaining to them in the same subject.
57:53 In other words, we have within us at every moment two determinations of what we do: a natural determination. I'm hungry — that owes nothing to determination by freedom; on the contrary, it's a constraint, I have to find food. We forget it because it's there. But think of the whole history of humanity — within it, there has more often been scarcity than abundance.
58:23 There are places in Australia where Aborigines walk for a week to find a root that will provide food for a while. I knew someone who worked in reforestation in Côte d'Ivoire, in West Africa, in a very forested region, rather close to the Amazon.
58:53 Like a climate, and he said that his workforce — the Africans working there on reforestation — their meal for the day was a plantain, a big banana like this, starchy, a little starchy, from which you can make an excellent dessert or excellent tapas — excellent tapas when you fry them in oil with sugar, it's delicious.
59:27 But otherwise the banana as such is much less sweet, it's starchy compared to the banana we know. So their only meal of the day was a plantain, vaguely warmed, without sauce, without anything. I'm not here to make you cry, but I'm telling you this so you realize that the problems of hunger and food must have been resolved long ago for us to end up believing that all this — the meal, all of it — is natural.
1:00:01 Hunger is natural, eating is natural, but the meal is not an instinct, it's an institution. The proof is that here we do it with chopsticks, there with forks, and elsewhere with the three fingers of the right hand — which one must never do with the left hand, which is meant for impure things. But if these two different domains, the one now called the hard sciences to simplify, that's the concept, the domain of the concepts of nature, or again the one over which the understanding legislates, the one on which the sciences work and especially the applied sciences.
The abyss between the sensible and the supersensible; freedom must act 1:00:46 But if these two different domains, which constantly limit each other, if not indeed in their legislation, at least however in their effects in the sensible world — you see here we clearly see the forest that must be cut down or removed to make the field appear, well, to produce the field, because it doesn't appear by magic. It takes elbow grease and thought. So, but if these two different domains, which constantly limit each other, if not indeed in their legislation, at least however in their effects, through the sensible world, do not constitute a single one, this comes from the fact that the concept of nature represents its objects in intuition not as things in themselves but as mere phenomena.
1:01:32 Whereas, on the other hand, the concept of freedom does indeed represent its object as a thing in itself, but not in intuition. You cannot touch freedom with your fingers, and consequently neither of them can provide theoretical knowledge of its object. There thus exists, for our faculty of knowledge as a whole — here we seem to come back to the beginning of the text — an unlimited but also inaccessible field.
1:02:06 Although an immeasurable gulf is established between the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the suprasensible, such that from the first to the second — that is, by means of the theoretical, scientific use of reason — no passage is possible, just as if they were different worlds, the first, the domain by nature, having no influence on the second, the domain by freedom. Nevertheless, this latter, the domain by freedom, must have — and 'must' is underlined, in italics — this latter must have an influence on the former.
1:02:54 I mean, the concept of freedom must make real in the sensible world — the material world, we'd say now — the sensible world, the end imposed by its laws. Good grief, I feel like I'm reading Marx saying what immediately differentiates even the most unskillful architect from the most expert bee — because the bee knows very well how to build cells in wax. The problem is, the architect has the house in his head before producing it in reality. Look at what I'm reading here under Kant's pen.
1:03:32 Nevertheless, this latter... the domain by freedom, the domain of man, must have an influence on the former. I did not say that man is free, but that man has the possibility of being free. Don't make me say what I haven't said. The debate is not between — freedom doesn't exist, we are determined by natural laws that govern us whether we like it or not — or the opposite: yes, yes, yes, we are free from birth because God placed freedom in our soul.
1:04:05 We set both back to back and say that one can move from determination to liberation. Liberation is deeper than freedom. Because there are both: there are my natural determinations, as I often tell you, I must eat to live — that owes nothing to freedom, isn't that so? Nor to the specifically human world — it's valid for the fly and the earthworm too, isn't that so? And even for Bintou. Yes, Bintou, now that you're a big TV star.
1:04:36 You need to keep up. Thank you to all those who commented on Bintou's performance in the last video. She's very proud because she's rather coquettish. So, let the verb 'must' be underlined here — M-U-S-T — this latter, the world of freedom, must produce effects, otherwise it's freedom of emptiness.
1:05:12 I mean the concept of freedom must make real in the sensible world the end imposed by its laws. I can shelter in a cave — the cave is natural, I didn't make it. The paintings on cave walls, for instance, no longer belong to legislation by nature but to legislation by freedom. Because it's not nature that is going to produce paintings of bulls or bison, etc., or saber-toothed tigers.
1:05:50 And nature must consequently be thought in such a way that the lawfulness of its form accords at least with the possibility of the ends that are to be realized in it according to the laws of freedom. I'll stop this effort of abstraction I've asked of you, to reflect on the fact that rarely has Kant been so close to dialectics, because in principle he's an author for whom 'dialectic' is generally a pejorative term, a bit like in Aristotle — but it's not at all dialectic such as it is.
Kant on the verge of dialectic; the opera house of Manaus 1:06:31 Come on, let me make a small detour to set things straight. There are two main things I ask you to retain about the word 'dialectic.' Sometimes it's the path that is supposed to lead us to truth, but that truth itself is not dialectical. That's the case with Plato, for example. Plato says indeed that the sciences, geometry, mathematics, etc., are essential to free us from the illusions of the sensible world, but that's not enough — we need dialectic further still, to bring us closer to what he symbolizes by the sun, absolute knowledge.
1:07:18 And only then is it a vision, no longer a discourse at all, no longer words — we fall silent and we look and we suckle. I'm not joking, I've quoted this to you several times, but I'm always thinking of the newcomers. Plato says, you will notice that the sun does not merely give the eye the ability to see and the object the ability to be seen. It's a third term, which is neither the eye nor the object, but which allows the one to be seen and the other to see.
1:07:49 But it is not only that, says Plato, it also gives beings growth and nourishment. Did you think I was joking when I spoke of suckling? So, look closely, Kant, without knowing it, is on the verge of being a dialectician when he shows these two antagonistic domains, nature and freedom. I repeat Rousseau's sentence, which so inspired Kant.
1:08:22 The impulse of appetite alone — there's nature; appetite, that's a metonymy as we say in stylistics. A metonymy, that is, generally speaking, everything of the order of instinct. It can also be the act of breathing, not just eating. The impulse of appetite alone is slavery — that means as long as I eat because it's necessary to stay alive, I live well but as a slave, under constraint.
1:08:53 Obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself — it's the 'one-self' part that must be underlined at least twelve times — obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom. I am never as free as when I free myself from natural determination by subscribing to collective, social determination if you prefer. When the legislator is not a tyrant.
1:09:25 The legislator — I speak in the singular, but it's generally a collective, it could be parliament, there you go. So you see these two domains, which have been fighting over one and the same territory since the beginning. That's fantastic as a thought. We see it clearly where the thing is embryonic — I'm thinking of a city like Manaus in Brazil.
1:10:04 You may have heard of it — you have to go up the Amazon for thousands of kilometers to suddenly see this immense city, one of Brazil's great cities, but where, as soon as you leave the last houses, there's the jungle, one of the most violently jungly jungles on the whole planet; as soon as you leave the city, along the Amazon, which is a river — forget the rivers we're used to seeing, isn't that so?
1:10:34 You can barely see the other bank, it's so far away. As for the mouth, you can't see it at all. The mouth is 150 km wide. I don't know, I don't know. The horizon keeps us from seeing anything beyond 15-20 km. There was a time when people came to these two cities seeking fortune, when there was the rubber boom. I'm giving you an example here. These two domains are always fighting over one and the same territory. The rubber boom — I don't know if it was terrible, the adventurers, the whole business, the bloody history.
1:11:21 And then it so happens that I believe it was the Dutch who stole rubber plants to grow them elsewhere, in Indonesia for instance, which was a Dutch colony until not that long ago historically. And then, above all, a little later synthetic rubber was discovered, which ruined all those who believed they were going to make a fortune.
1:11:51 I don't know what became of... it no longer had the importance it once had. Now, there was such a fortune at the time when natural rubber was being sought that in Manaus there was an opera house — that's where I was going with this — an immense palace, where operas from the repertoire were performed, Carmen, Tosca, The Valkyrie, I don't know. When natural rubber was ruined, the jungle reclaimed its rights.
1:12:26 Yes, trees growing in the opera house, abandoned, the walls ripped open by the pressure of the vegetation. You've all seen it like I have. I don't know if it surprised you like it did me, I think so too, but it never stops surprising me. On a Paris sidewalk, at the right angle where a building's façade meets the ground, perpendicular to the ground, in between you have plants growing. What is it, the strength of a tiny little plant, a bit of grass worth nothing, that manages to make a place for itself to the point that you sometimes see concrete deformed near a tree whose roots are growing, for example.
Technique as means: artificial intelligence and Heidegger 1:13:09 Man who wants to introduce — that is the legislation called by freedom. Freedom means that it doesn't proceed from natural constraint; it doesn't mean we're free when the one building the road or the house with his jackhammer — he hasn't said that's it, that it's when he's working that he's free, that's Nazi. That's what was written at the entrance of the Buchenwald camp, you know: work liberates, Arbeit macht frei. 'Work more to earn more,' you know, it wasn't that long ago that there was that slogan.
1:13:42 No, we're revising a lot of things, because now we're getting to artificial intelligence. Pagani, what's the connection? What is this now? What's this detour? How does it detour? Some people worry about artificial intelligence. Me, I worry — whose hands is it going to fall into? That's very different. How many times must we repeat that if I kill someone with a knife, it's rarely the knife that gets put on trial, and it's not the knife that's sent to jail. And we're quite right to do so!
1:14:16 Artificial intelligence is a knife, it's a means in service of an end. My end is 'Hello ChatGPT, can you translate this text for me?' That's my end. Artificial intelligence is an instrument, all right? And like every instrument, it does neither good nor evil, but it gives me — it multiplies, well, it considerably reinforces, as technical progress advances, as the means itself progresses, as its efficiency improves.
1:14:50 It multiplies my power to do good as well as evil. It's true that with an atomic weapon you do a bit more harm than with a knife. But with nuclear energy you can also cure cancer. And with that knife by which the impersonal 'I' I mentioned killed someone, that same 'I' can also, with that knife, if he knows how to use it well and has studied for it, operate on someone's appendicitis who was on the verge of peritonitis, that is, an absolute emergency.
1:15:32 So the same instrument does good or evil depending on the hands it falls into. When I say hands, I mean above all the intentions of the one who wields it. Isn't that right? So let's not hide those responsible for evil, whoever they are and wherever they come from, from whatever camp they come from. Let's not hide them behind the tool. Like Heidegger, who spent his whole work putting technology on trial.
1:16:02 Ah yes, but then there are a few exceptions, when he says that the greatest event of Western metaphysics was the creation of the Panzerdivisionen, the Reich's armored divisions. Yes, yes, but I heard it, Black Notebooks 1933, if you want the sources. I already gave them in a video; if you ask me, I'll find them again, the reference and the page. And yes, we have a duty of Eros toward the Führer—I'm not inventing anything, these are Heidegger's sentences. We have a duty of Eros toward the Führer, if you're so inclined.
1:16:43 And then, the greatest achievement of Western metaphysics is the creation of the Panzerdivisionen. All of a sudden, technology is good for something there. You see clearly that it depends on the end being pursued. That's what I wanted to draw attention to. And that of course applies today to artificial intelligence. What's monstrous is that in what's called liberalism, it means—it's true in one sense—it means I have the freedom to do something criminal with it, if I have the means for it, and if that's my intention, if there are people, peoples, entire countries that don't interest me, I can liquidate them with the artificial.
1:17:29 So now they say more. They say it could wipe out all of humanity. Now that's muddying the waters. You know, there's a danger of nuclear war like there's never been before. That doesn't mean it will happen. But there's a danger. I keep repeating it periodically because that's where I started my very first videos. That's more than ten years ago now. It's ten years ago, sorry.
1:18:00 And I was already saying at the time, between crisis and war, philosophy, question mark. You've heard what better can be done for now than philosophy, at the theoretical level anyway. Except that it's been ten years and not only has it not improved, but it's gotten worse since then. So when I say I've never seen the danger of the worst, there's a possibility here of the extinction of humanity or of most people, and that is quite current.
1:18:44 But believe me, it's not a danger for everyone. Some people have had bunkers for a long time. They're billionaires of course, but they have bunkers, you know, the Jeff Bezoses, the... Sorry? Elon Musk. Yes, thank you, Elon Musk.
1:19:14 I don't know why, since I've had sciatica, it's made my forgetting of names worse. If there are any doctors among you, maybe they can explain that to me. So, yes, with supplies to wait for the radiation to settle down, etc. There's inequality there too, isn't there? So the way people talk about it now, as it happens, you know, you've heard about these leading agents of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, the others, who are warning outright, one of whom I believe resigned from the company he was working for.
Intelligence is transmissible: common sense in Descartes 1:20:02 As it happens, this distancing from the tool, as if it were the tool that was the problem and not the ends it's being made to serve—as it happens, this distancing from artificial intelligence comes just as the Chinese are starting to develop software that equals and will soon surpass the Americans. That's no coincidence, because there's nothing more transmissible than human intelligence.
1:20:35 How many mathematical geniuses are there? Lost among these children. I once saw a terrifying documentary on... in India. I'm not talking right now about... children who spend the whole day, working hours. I'm talking about children of 8, 9 years old, who make bricks near a kiln, bricks, bricks, to pay off their parents' debts.
1:21:14 I remember, when I remember things like that, I pause for a moment because sometimes I think, am I exaggerating or what—it's huge, what I'm about to say, it's not to... well yes, yes, yes. Unfortunately I don't have the video but I'll find it again. The child started crying, saying that his dream would be to go to school. There he was, making bricks, at age 9. So there you have it, think hard about that, because it's not the worst piece of bad news of the day—it's actually rather good news.
1:21:54 It's that nothing is more transmissible within humanity than intelligence. I'll put it this way: if someone in a given country was able to find the laws governing the functioning of a gene, in biology for example, that means someone from any other country can find it too.
1:22:26 Humanity is not divided into species that are unequal from the point of view of the understanding, that faculty present in each one of us, apart from very rare marginal cases of violent pathologies. In short, what is condensed in that first sentence—which is like an atomic explosion—that first sentence which founds modern thought, the one that opens the first line of Descartes's Discourse on Method.
1:23:09 I'll build a bit of suspense before I tell it to you. He had learned to construct a discourse with the Oratorian brothers. You know, Descartes knew very well what he was doing. The Discourse on Method appeared in 1637. A year earlier, in 1636, Galileo had been condemned. And Descartes, who was clever, knew very well that he shouldn't say everything he wanted, but had to disguise his thought, to the point that his motto was larvatus prodeo, I advance masked.
1:23:45 He knew very well that at the time there was the Church watching, which would say something deserved the stake. So he begins with this sentence, which I'll tell you now. I'm telling you it's an atomic bomb if you look closely. We weren't far off there with artificial intelligence and a nuclear war. Good sense, in Descartes, is the equivalent of the understanding in Kant: good sense is the thing in the world most equally distributed.
1:24:21 It seems simple, it seems clear, Descartes—you see, it goes far. It means that in each of us—I'm continuing what Descartes says—good sense, that is, the faculty, as he puts it, of distinguishing the true from the false. If I tell you two and two make eleven, anyone with good sense will say, wouldn't you like some more coffee? Yes, I'm tired. There you go. Good sense is not where differences between men lie. We may have more or less money, more or less health—more, or again, these things too are tied to fortune, but anyway, more or less health.
1:24:59 There is an inequality which, alas, is not reduced only to social measures. There are all sorts of differences between individuals in size, in whatever, in beauty, in ugliness, according to men's tastes. There's a difference at that level, but not in the faculty of distinguishing the true from the false. You're in the room or you're not in the room, that's what I mean—even the most dim-witted, the most...
1:25:35 Knows very well that two don't make eleven. And he adds in his argument—he's clever—to prove that it's the thing in the world most equally distributed, that we see men claiming more of this or more of that, says Descartes. I'm summarizing here. Humans—not in these words—but we never see, he noticed this, we never see someone asking for more good sense.
Rational and reasonable; conclusion on reflection 1:26:05 Which proves that he has as much of it as anyone else, after all. You see, this business of distinction has taken us far—the understanding, everything you broadly call logic, at work in the sciences, and reason, which is no longer a theoretical but a practical faculty, and you find it in the language—I do mean in the language, not language in general—in the French language for instance, with ratio or with raison you have two derivatives, rationnel and raisonnable, and they're not the same.
1:26:46 When you tell a child you're not being reasonable, that doesn't mean he doesn't know the table of logarithms. When he makes a calculation mistake in arithmetic etc., we don't say you're not reasonable, we say you're not rational. And both come from reason. Agreed? So reason is indeed the practical faculty. They're distinguished from the understanding only, for example, in morality, in law—that is, morality with an institution, for a community, in law, in jurisdiction, in jurisprudence.
1:27:30 Reason is at work as soon as there is action, and therefore as soon as there is an end—it's the faculty of ends—whereas the understanding is careful not to be. Fortunately the sciences fought against finalism. When physics was established in the time of Galileo, roughly in the transition from the 16th to the 17th century. Scientific physics, which leads us to today's physics, is a revolution—moreover, that's where we left off in the last video—Kant himself calls it the Copernican revolution.
1:28:20 He's alluding to the fact that, recalling that revolution is a term that comes from astronomy—what is above comes below, you know, the revolution of the stars, the trajectory of the stars—the Copernican revolution: I thought I was at the center and now I'm cast out to the periphery. That's the Copernican revolution. I'm not at the center, I'm at the periphery. And that's what made Pascal, who was a great scientist and not only a great thinker, say: it's a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. In other words, it's infinite.
1:29:00 There, I won't bother you anymore, but I'd like you to remember that for a field to appear, a forest or a marsh must disappear. And therefore two legislations—the one that was there before man appeared on earth, the legislation by nature, and the one that man introduces with his own aims—these are legislations that clash on one and the same territory, the one in which you live every day. There you go.
1:29:33 Well, thank you very much for the intervention of Alouf le Givre, without which—when he speaks of the reflection of movements of matter, and I'll end on this, on this little detail, for his benefit—it's not so simple, the notion of reflection, as I said at the very beginning and now illustrate to finish: I say to our friend, stand in front of a mirror, look closely, you'll see that the reflection is already complicated.
1:30:03 You think it's you facing you, and no. Because what's on your right is on the left in the mirror, and vice versa. So there's something dialectical in the notion of reflection, and not only mechanical. There you go. See you next time, I say thanks again to Adrien and I say thanks to Bintou for not having walked in front of the screen this time. She asked me to thank you for all the praise she received in your comments on my video and also by phone about the performance of her latest video. Thank you Adrien, thank you all.
