A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (9 page)

It is a question of the gradual liquidation of the State.
When human nature is changed, when we
arrive at the standardization of consciousness, then, instead of a State, we shall have small “cooperative” organisms in which each person will freely adapt to a universal order based on justice: this is the
DREAM
of noble souls!
In this idiotic phase, each person will be paid not according to his merits or services but according to his necessities.
This is the postulate of justice, since every man has the right to live.

Marxism

This “radiant” phase will occur in a distant future, in an indeterminate time.

Here is where the dialectic of Hegelian history enters, which is gradually going to achieve this transformation, as Marxism has quite a strong notion of imperfection.
It knows that things can evolve only slowly and must pass through intermediary phases far from perfection.

In this Marxist thought, the proletariat is a kind of saint, as well as being an elementary force.

1.
The proletariat has nothing to lose nor to keep.
Everything to destroy.

2.
It has only necessities.
It is not corrupted by values.

3.
It is a class with a universal character, at the very root of all social structure.

4.
It is a victim of economic production.

The liberation of the proletariat by revolution is a fundamental condition of all social order.
And it is the liberation of need as a source of values.

A second time.
We see here that Marxism is not an ideology or a truth, it is just simply the freedom from human needs as a source of values.

The revolution, therefore, is going to free
all
men from natural needs, and on the basis of this freedom, the values will be created by themselves.
It must be clearly understood that Marxism is not a revolution of ideas but rather a revolution between concrete men.
It is a liberation of man.

The new ideas: future thought is unpredictable and will be created by itself in this new human order.

The politics: organization of action in order to reach a goal.

Praxis is conscious, practical action.
According
to Marx, thought must materialize in action.
The idea must change itself into an historical force.

Contemplation goes to hell.

Marxism declares the impossibility of all non-materialized theory.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche, like Kant and Schopenhauer, was Polish!
*

1844–1900

Nietzsche: the nerves of Shelley, the stomach of Carlyle, and the soul of a young lady.

Nietzsche’s immediate genealogy:
Darwin (theory of evolution by struggle)
Spencer (English philosopher, theory of evolution from simple to compound, multiple)
Bismarck

Schopenhauer.

Nietzsche was not a philosopher in the strict sense: he wrote aphorisms, some notes.

In order to understand Nietzsche, it is necessary to understand an idea as simple as that of raising cows.

A cattleman is going to try to improve the species in such a way that he will let the weakest cows die and will keep the strongest cows and bulls for breeding.

All of Nietzschean morality finds its basis here.

The human race is like all the others; it is improved by a struggle and a natural selection done by life itself.

Here we see the most sensational and the most provocative aspect of this philosophy: it is the opposition to Christianity, which, according to Nietzsche, was a morality of the weak imposed on the strong, harmful to the human race and, therefore, immoral.

Of course, this attitude was revolutionary and turned all the value systems upside down.

Nietzsche—and this is his major distinction from Schopenhauer—
is on the side of
LIFE
.

I point out to you that human thinking, beginning with Kant, increasingly looks for life, evolution, or existence.
There is a deep concern of the mind which begins to distrust abstract systems and feels life itself is increasingly threatened.

Now, Nietzsche, already in his first work on the source of Greek tragedy, set Dionysus (god of wine, of orgies, and of vital ecstasy) against Apollo (god of tranquillity, of esthetics, and of contemplation).
In Greek tragedy, it is the chorus who represented Dionysus, while Apollo expressed himself through dialogue.

Dionysus is the strength of the human race, of life, while Apollo is the individual, weak and mortal.

This opposition between Apollo and Dionysus still appears today.
Example: Beethoven.
Nietzsche considers pessimism to be a weakness, condemned by life and optimism, a superficial (Canadian!) thing.
*

What remains?

A leap into the depths: it is tragic optimism which remains for man, adoration of life and of its cruel laws, despite all the weakness of the individual.

In Greece, it is Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who represent the equilibrium condemned by Nietzsche, while Euripides and Aristophanes proclaim vital law.

Here it is necessary to provide a secondary clarification: why is Greece so important for us?
Because in Greece, for the first time, rational man comes to fruition, man formed by Reason.
So that is why Greek philosophy and art become so important for us, because all of Europe and modern humanity come from Greece.

Nietzsche’s strength consisted of an extremely perspicacious and cruel critique of all our ideas, of the human soul, of morality and of philosophy.
He demonstrated that philosophical thought does not come to fruition outside of life, as if philosophers looked at the world and its evolution from a distance, but this thought is bathed in life and always expresses life when it is not falsified.

Nietzsche was a great forerunner in this sense, although he appropriated much from Schopenhauer, especially that which concerns freedom of instinct, even if in a completely opposite sense.

For Nietzsche, life is not good, but we are condemned to life.
This leads to paradoxes, such as his
admiration for cruelty, harshness (without mercy), and for the whip, weapons.
A “military” philosophy.

In Nietzsche, we find three dominant concepts.

In
Zarathustra
(of which he sold only forty copies and gave seven of them as gifts):
1.
God is dead.
This means that humanity has reached its maturity.
Faith in God is already anachronistic.
Man ends up all alone in the cosmos.
Nothing but life.

2.
(Stupid idea.) The ideal of the superman.
Man is a transient phenomenon that must be overtaken.
Man is thus problematic.
He is a bridge and not an end in himself.

His notion of man: we are nothing more than a means to reach a higher being.
Now, love and devotion for this future man, the superman, are more important than love of others.

3.
The Eternal Return.

This is originally an idea of scientific origin, born on the one hand from the notion of infinite time, and on the other, from the idea of causality.

Entropy.
Loss of energy through radiation.

Nietzsche starts from an original cause which produces all the other causes, cause-effects,
etc.

Automatic process from cause to effect, thanks to which we arrive at the present moment.

This will be exceeded by other cause-effects and finally will vanish, and again the first cause will return, etc., and we shall arrive again at the same situation.

As time is infinite, this will repeat itself eternally.

This is a naïve and outmoded idea, because the idea of causality works only in the phenomenological world; it can be useful for science and can be verified through experimentation, but it is limited by our means of perception.

We cannot therefore speak of the thing in itself, of God, of eternity.

Nietzsche starts from a scientific idea of causality and constructs a metaphysical system of life.

He was seduced by the supreme affirmation of life.

Without God, there are no external laws.

—The only law for Nietzsche is the affirmation of life.

—It is an anti-Christian and atheistic philosophy.

—It is not so easy to be an atheist.

Sunday, May 25

In giving the general characteristics of existentialism, I forgot a very important thing.

For classical philosophy, the philosopher was an observer who looked at life, but he was outside of life.

Kierkegaard already attacked this attitude in saying that the philosopher is in life.

Philosophy is an act of existence.
It is too easy to consider the philosopher as a privileged being.

In each philosophy, there is a fundamental choice which is arbitrary, and everything else, system, reasoning, only serve to justify this choice—to prove that it responds to reality.
This
idea of the fundamental choice
, arbitrary, was taken up again by Sartre: it is an act of freedom by our faculty for creating values.

And this fundamental choice in Sartre can go as far as the choice of negation as value: if I choose death and not life, everything that leads me to death, for example, the lack of food—becomes a positive value.
Moreover, it is for this reason that Sartre was so interested in Genet, because Genet chose evil; naturally this is a foolish thing, because
every police chief knows quite well that Genet did not choose anything.
He started with some petty thefts, etc., and so he became a thief by an imperceptible mechanism, minute by minute.
This fundamental choice establishes what they call
existential psychoanalysis
.

I return to this important point about existentialism:
the philosopher is in life
, one of the major currents of our thinking during the 19th century.

The path of this Western thought could be defined by the great questions it asked.

1.
The reduction of thought.
Thought for Kant becomes conscious of its limits.
It already knows that one cannot demonstrate, for example, the existence of God, but that it is just as impossible to demonstrate that God does not exist.

Through the consecutive reductions of Feuerbach, of Marx (consciousness as a function of life, “being defines consciousness”), the phenomenological reduction of Husserl, where already philosophy does not seek the reality of things nor the truth, but only a kind of putting in order of the facts of our consciousness, and finally the psychoanalytical reduction of Freud which, in my view, does not have
much to do with these reductions, since it is of a scientific nature.

Reduction is the dominant characteristic of the 19th century.

2.
The other problem is more difficult, that of life, of
becoming
.

Philosophy, before Hegel, claimed to describe a fixed world in a state of stability where the notion of movement, of becoming, surely was disturbing (already in Greek philosophy), but was not the fundamental problem.

Now Hegel is the philosophy of becoming.

It is the idea of an imperfection of reason which is in the process of moving ahead, of developing.

Schopenhauer links thought to life even more directly, but at the same time he establishes a principle of contemplation, of renunciation, by which one can, so to speak, evade or kill life.

Existentialism
gets bogged down in life
.
It is in existence, but it also considers itself to be a vital act (curious thing).

What is the phenomenology of Husserl?
It derives from mathematics.

Husserl was a logician and mathematician.
His phenomenology is a kind of classification of the facts of consciousness.
Now, it is curious that this spiritual algebra of Husserl was used above all by Heidegger for existentialism, which is the complete opposite of Husserlien phenomenology.

These abstract concepts still persist in thought nowadays (that of Aristotle, Catholic, etc.).
Now, through a dialectical opposition, [
words missing
] is breaking out against existentialism, in structuralism.

(Gombrowicz finds his bearings, geography of philosophy.)
Structuralism is a difficult thing to define because it originates in different regions of thought.
It is both the fruit of mathematical thought, like the linguistic studies of Saussure, and [
sentence incomplete
] and in the sociology of Lévi-Strauss and even [
the text breaks off here
].

About the author

The works of the Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) were deemed scandalous and subversive by Nazis, Stalinists, and the Polish Communist government in turn.
Gombrowicz spent twenty-four years in self-imposed exile in Argentina, returned to Europe in 1963, and eventually settled on the French Riviera.
His
Cours de philosophie en six heures un quart
began as lectures to his wife, Rita, and his good friend Dominique de Roux.
De Roux had edited Gombrowicz’s autobiographical
A Kind of Testament
, and the two were so close that Gombrowicz once asked de Roux to get him a gun or some poison so that he could kill himself.
De Roux, hoping to take his friend’s mind off the heart problems that were eventually to kill him, asked Gombrowicz for lessons in philosophy.
According to Rita Gombrowicz, “Dominique understood full well that only philosophy, in this moment of physical decadence, had the power to mobilize his spirit.”
This first published English translation of
A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes
retains the anonymous footnotes and textual gaps of the original French publication.

*
A popular referendum on April 27, 1969, offered French voters a variety of proposed administrative reforms.
When President Charles de Gaulle received an unexpected defeat in the vote, he resigned the presidency the following day and went into retirement.
[Translator’s note.]

*
Dominique de Roux.
[Except as otherwise specified, all notes appeared in the original French edition.
—Ed.]

*
Bracketed indications of gaps in the text appear in the French edition.
[Editor’s note.]