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The fact remains that I find myself in exactly the same position of philosophical uncertainty.

So, to sum up. The rights of man, human dignity, the foundations of politics, I’m leaving all that aside, I have no theoretical ammunition, nothing that would allow me to validate such standards.

This leaves ethics, and there, I do have something. Only one thing, to be honest, luminously identified by Schopenhauer, and that is compassion. Rightly exalted by Schopenhauer and rightly vilified by Nietzsche as the source of all morality. I sided—and this is hardly news—with Schopenhauer.

It does not allow for the establishment of sexual morality, but that is something of a relief.

It does, however, allow one to establish justice and law. Quite easily, but without the picturesque elaborations of Kant (I use the word picturesque in the strongest sense of the term; one could compare reading Kant with a hike through the Alps. It’s very curious that he never left Königsberg,* an area that is quite flat. Much more than Nietzsche, he gives me that intoxicating impression of rarefied air, of gazing out to the farthest distances …).

It remains a mystery that Schopenhauer alludes only with a vague terror to the origin of compassion. For after all compassion is merely a feeling, something fragile on the face of it, although it seems to be reborn, naturally, from generation to generation.

Not to mention the question that is the logical corollary: What if compassion disappeared?

I think, in that case, humanity too would disappear.

And that the disappearance of such humanity would be a good thing.

And that we would have to wait for the arrival of another intelligent species, more cooperative, better adapted by its original tribal organization to ascend toward moral law (by which I mean a species rather superior to primates).

To break with humanism, therefore, does not imply breaking with morality, which stems from the apparent organization of the world into separate beings—whether or not these beings are mortal.

In short, I’ve just been won round to a sort of absolute. I think that’s rather good news.

It is a limited absolute (moral law is rigorously applied but in a limited domain). What can be said of what remains outside? Free will? Yes, I’ll go for that; I’ll assume it has some meaning. So, free will for everything that is morally indifferent (which, it has to be said, represents rather a lot and the great tragedy of our overpoliced societies seems to me excessively limit the domain).

It’s not that I really believe in this notion of free will. Spinoza’s argument (conscious of desires but not of their cause, hence the sense of freedom) still seems to me irrefutable. And if I gently nod my head when I hear the phrase used around me, it’s so as not to make things worse for myself; so that the discussion doesn’t get out of hand. Because I’ve noticed that people in general are very attached to the fiction of free will and that, maybe, it is a useful fiction.

Human beings, in general, are possessed of a surprising ontological self-importance.

But they can have their free will, since they’re so keen on it; it’s like a decoration, it doesn’t cost much and people seem to like it.

On condition you don’t think it through too clearly, it’s no problem.

No problem at all.

There I go, I realize I’ve started writing “human being,” slipping into the third person.

It’s not that I feel superior; please, don’t think I mean it like that.

It’s more a sort of disparity, the persistent impression I’m playing a role.

As you know, for years now I’ve lived abroad. There are certain clichés associated with the French (fine wine, fine food …) and more than once, to grease the wheels of social communication, I have found myself overplaying my role as a Frenchman. I have launched, apparently enthusiastically, into extravagant eulogies about Madiran wine or some food or other I’ve only just heard about.

For similar reasons, though more rarely, I have found