• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 847 0

there’s the other real problem that the adversaries of the Epicureans, from Cicero to Kant to Rousseau, have repeatedly raised. The theory may explain the fall of bodies, entropy, the decline of our flesh, the precariousness of our lives, it may do justice to physical phenomena such as floods, turbulence, storms, or the apparent rising of flames. But there’s one thing it leaves out of the equation: the appearance of that very particular type of pebble called consciousness. Everyone must feel that it is problematic to reduce this to a sum of particles, springing up out of nothing or out of the fullness of matter—which comes to the same thing—which met by chance, joined together, aggregated, and formed a block. The one who expresses this best is Rousseau. That so-called naturalist who in reality only loved gardens and music—that is, nature reworked, rearranged, denatured—develops his response admirably in the great anti-Lucretian texts of the Second Discourse or Chapter 9 of the Essai† (as you can see, I’ve been reunited with my books). The state of nature, he explains, is a time of great floods and colossal earthquakes. It’s a time when all the world’s regions were surrounded by water and portions of the globe fell away like drifting islands. But what was distinctive about that time, he adds, its resultant and essential characteristic, is that the only humans that could emerge from it were stupid, barbarous, and incapable of living together. We don’t know which of the “beasts” or “trees” was the most ferocious in that world, but what we do know very well is that it had no place for real humans …

Fifth, the fact—to which the opponents of the Epicureans also objected, in particular Nietzsche—that even supposing that consciousness might somehow be formed, that one might—by what mental acrobatics I don’t know—manage to allow for the constitution of a soul through an addition of pebbles, this would give rise, whether one wants it or not, to a stony, ossified soul, formed once and for all, as smooth as a shingle, monolithic, with no becoming, no flaws. But we know that it’s not like that, that the subject is always in the making, engaged in quite a different adventure, a thousand times more complicated. You are this, you are that. Something else in a different situation. We are a meeting place of multiple identities, broken, contradictory, vying with each other, then at peace, then once again at loggerheads. Each of us is not a subject but an aviary. Perhaps we are not the devil, but each of us is legion. It’s this multiplicity, this shambles, that your theory of stones or comets will always fail to take into account.

Finally, this theory has a major fault, one last snag, which is that I would be incapable of using it (and at the end of the day that’s what counts), specifically, either as a philosopher or in my everyday life. Even supposing that it could explain how a subjectivity is formed, supposing that this idea of falling in a straight line and of an agglomeration of atoms meeting by chance and not remaining stuck to each other could explain to us the genesis of this complex, shifting, ambiguous object, changing from one moment to the next, which on arrival has the face, voice, and silhouette of Michel Houellebecq or of his Irish neighbor, there is one more thing (of which in this case I’m quite sure) that it is incapable of explaining. That is the mystery of what happens when two of these chances meet, the spark produced when two of these tumbling objects cross and take shape, in a word the moment at which two of your stones come into contact and when the humans make a little bit of humanity …

Dear Michel, you’ll think that I’ve made a great deal out of a poor little pebble you threw out in passing, in the course of debate.

That may be.

But it’s because I take the author of The Elementary Particles seriously.

And therefore I also take seriously this feature of Epicurean philosophy, which I’m sure you didn’t simply overlook.

Thus to sum up, I have nothing against the Epicureans.

I’m not denying that they liberated