Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [71]
I have your last letter in front of me and am in the middle of going slowly through your arguments one by one and wondering where I can find a point of entry.
Perhaps a way in would be the question of a “religion without God,” although that is not at all what I am calling for. At best that would be Voltaire, at worst Maurras. In any case, it’s not me.
Or perhaps your vision of Kant who you say never left the rarefied, sublime air of Königsberg. First, that’s not true. It’s a legend invented by Germaine de Staël in the pages she devotes to him in her book De l’Allemagne [On Germany], which are, to say the least, rather inaccurate. It’s not at all the case in fact, since even in his youth, when he was a tutor at the home of the pastor Andersch and later the Keyserling family, he went to live in Judtschen, near Gumbinnen, then Osterode,* and then lived in other places. What’s more, this image of Kant as immensely uptight, as regular as clockwork, frozen in his discipline, with his obsessive austerity, his corset of imperatives and abstractions, leaves out a whole dimension of turmoil, madness, even schizophrenia. This was just as much a part of him and explains, or is one of the explanations for, this need of his to lock himself up in a cast-iron system of thought. The “categories of understanding” are also a verbal straitjacket, a bastion against his spiritual tempests, the antidote to the theosophy, occultism, and spiritualism that—we tend to forget—were the first temptations to beset the young Kant. Indeed, he spent the rest of his life trying both to allay his obsessive fear of them and to avert their return.
More generally speaking, there is this “philosophy” about which you say you “don’t know much” but that you are able to make free with in a way I really envy—this way of saying with such assurance “Schopenhauer thinks that …” or “Nietzsche replies that …” or “Spinoza’s argument about this or that is, in my view, irrefutable because …” It would be unthinkable for a professional philosopher to express himself in this way. It’s difficult for an old fogey like myself, trained in the idea that philosophies are systems, coherent and closed entities, and that there is nothing more perilous than to take a piece, isolate it, give it its own particular destiny, appropriate it, in short quote it! This was Jacques Derrida’s first lesson when he met with the new arrivals at the École Normale, who, as in the army, were called “conscripts.” Without being at all facetious, I would pay to unlearn that lesson of no floating philosophemes, never any philosophical utterances uprooted from their page of origin! On principle, never say “Hegel or Heidegger or Heraclitus says that …” because, unmoored from its context and, still worse, from its original language, this statement no longer has the same meaning and sometimes no longer has any meaning at all! (You may object that this is exactly what I did myself the other day when I was putting forward my flimsy, labyrinthine construct inspired by Levinas and Spinoza, my monadology without a monad, my concept of the subject. Yes and no. I was tinkering about with something, piecing together a contraption of my own. In doing so, I’m afraid I was skating within the forced patterns of compulsory figures. Whereas quoting freestyle is quite a different approach … It’s utterly different, in fact, being the phenomenal power of someone who sees the field of philosophy as an expanse of divorced utterances and a game of free association … And I repeat, I really wish I could dare to seize that power.)
Then there’s Auguste Comte, who seems to really fascinate you, whereas I’ve always been not only suspicious of his “we’re going to reconstruct society using science” side but was never actually interested in him. (Well, no, I’m mistaken there. As I said that, I realized that there is a bridge between Comte and myself or, to be more