Larvatus Prodeo, j’avance masqué écrivait René Descartes, un philosophe du coin qui avait sur la morale une position assez facile à résumer. En attendant d’avoir compris grâce à la science comment le monde marche, et de pouvoir agir dans ce monde avec toutes les lumières de la raison, il faut savoir se contenter de la morale et des coutumes de son époque. LIRE LA SUITE EN FRANCAIS
Larvatus Prodeo, I advance masked wrote René Descartes, a philosopher who had a view on morality a rather easy to summarize. Until we have understood through science how the world works, and can act in this world with all the lights of reason, we must learn to settle for the morals and customs of his time. That is why the big man will eventually say that the best thing for a philosopher is to adopt the attitude of a priest or a professor or a journalist or anything as long as those who are disturbed by his thoughts can not whack it. That’s what René Descartes referred to the provisional morality. The morality we adopt before people can live fully in the light of science and reason.
This view will be continued by another philosopher, not a son of Touraine, a Jew of Portuguese descent who spent much of his life in Holland, Benedict Spinoza. He managed to explain what comes after morality. It is Ethics. Ethics is morality which adopts the perspective of reason. When you obey a moral rule, you do not argue. If the rule says you must not have sexual relations with your neighbor, it is best to snatch your eyes than watching this neighbor with lust, you have two possible attitudes about it . A moral attitude and an ethical attitude. If your attitude is moral, you will think that adultery is good or bad, but you do not discuss the rule, nor its merits. Because it is a commandment. If you have an ethical attitude you think of the pleasures and enjoyment that you can draw from your neighborhood, and the amount of trouble and strife that this relationship can bring. You do the sum of the joys and sorrows, and you make your choice after careful weighing. Morality is a set of rules of behavior which govern by fear, or faith, or belief. Ethics is a practical knowledge of laws of nature that pushes us to choose what is good or bad for us.
Immanuel Kant’s attempt to formulate a rule of reason, as it can be applied to any practical situations. In sum, he will give his Ethics practical reason. Spinoza already admitted that the human being to be happy, must seek the happiness of others, of all humanity. Diminish the happiness of your neighbor is less chance of being happy. According to this principle, Kant therefore admit that all our behavior should be emulated by all others. In other words, I must act so that if I do something, everyone must do the same thing without putting the world to catastrophe. Specifically, I have drawn from my behavior a maxim, and this maxim can become the rule that determines the will of all. If I consume the energy of an average american, I release the universal maxim: every person can consume the energy of an average american. Now I know that if this maxim determines the will of all people of the earth, we run to the disaster. The rule is not ethical, I must reduce my intake. Similarly in the current state of thinking, if I think the rule says: thou shalt love thy neighbor with pleasure, can be applied to all mankind, we go to civil war.
Friedrich Nietzsche not like the will be determined by a rule. Insofar as for him, it is not the rule that shows the way to the will, but rather the contrary. The will, which manifests its power by force trace a path that the weak have no choice but to follow. And the good, far from being an idea came from the deity, the beautiful, is the quality of lords, strong men (then, in a world still dominated by men today, this is not the quality of women). If our society is increasingly the party of the victims, said the philosopher, it is because the weak have their intelligence in the service of a morality that tends to prevail and cover the party of the strong. The moral of the victims is a moral full of resentment, inspired by christianity. Victims hate strength and power and would condemn it. Nietzsche’s superman want to substitute what is good for him, the superhuman who sees beyond good and evil to the morality of the weak .
The contemporary philosopher René Girard, born in Avignon, who spent his life at Stanford, echoes this thought by allowing us to characterize further what makes the difference between morals and ethics. It is the sacred. Morality is a set of mandatory terms that date back to the dawn of time, and if we can not discuss it, it is that we know they are not debatable. And why? Because this origin is divine. So either we deny the divinity, which is the most common attitude today, and we reject morality, we accuse it fo making us feel guilty, to prevent us to enjoy, to express ourselves, to think freely. Or, we give it credit blind, and we adopt his commandments blindly, which is even the case of religious, so rare they are. It is faith. Rene Girard, like René Descartes, choose to give the religious feeling of morality a temporary credit. For the contemporary philosopher, we are wrong to accuse religion, or church, or I do not know what scarecrow, to deprive us from enjoying the neighbor. The real obstacle to my enjoyment, it is not god, this is not the pope, it is not even me. The obstacle is the neighbor, or worse, the neighbor desire.
Suffice to say that the philosopher asks us to practice thinking, that is to say, ethics, closest (in this) from cartesian inspiration. Until the reason enlighten me, it is better to rely on tradition and avoid taking it for a fool. For one thing as tradition, religion and morality are aware, it is the violence.
Violence is not just a moral concern, it is also the obsession of modern states: thugs who threatened from all sides. Basically, Girard goes further than Spinoza, the only one way to be happy is to be at peace. Because violence is the problem most consistent and most repeatable, the most banal of human history. Violence is Evil. With a capital letter. It haunts the human religions since ancient societies and their barbarous sacrifices, until the crucifixion of Jesus. Violence is evil. With a lowercase letter. It concerns the modern states and governments of left and right. It is not difficult to engage in violence. A trifle, a flip, and it does become wild. It is much more difficult to stop it, if not impossible.
What is the origin of human violence and what is its particularity? Unlike Nietzsche, Girard will doubt that man is capable of desiring spontaneously, and therefore a fortiori, that it is capable of will. For him, the human brain is a huge machine to simulate, and man is the animal that has pushed further the ability to imitate. Humans not only imitate to learn. They also mimics what others desire. And precisely this ability to desire has no limits. That, says the philosopher, is the source of all human violence. Because if I covet my neighbor that is beautiful, feminine beauty is coveted all over the word associated to prestige and class. And if I want my neighbor, I guess he has a je ne sais quoi that I lack, that leads me to be her rival. Hell, said Jean Paul Sartre, is other people. He could not say better. Morality either does could not say better, when it imposes on me a rule that I do not understand because I believe myself capable of dominating violence. For this desire that Girard calls mimetic desire is an inexhaustible mine of conflict that drives people to covet the property of others and to despise his own.
The men are not able to stop their violence, and human cultures, all human cultures, are that large systems intended to protect men against their violence by multiplying prohibitions. Because as I said, the problem with violence is that we can not stop it. Intervene in a fight is to increase the fighting, increase the scuffle. Hence the reflex to keep out. However, there is something very special in our society. The gradual disappearance of all taboos and prohibitions. What happens there, why our society violence is not degenerating in a final clash, nuclear for example? What is this special protection which allows our company to dispense with the religious and practical wisdom? Has it developed precisely this culture of nonviolence, and reached that thought and ethics foreshadowed by earlier philosophers? How can one speak of a culture of non-violence in a society obsessed with terrorism and insecurity, bringing the war beyond its borders and lives from the nuclear industry and weapons trade? And how to say this society is really out of religion when it claims to know everything except the nature and origin of religion on which it is still silent? And finally, most importantly, if our society has shifted from morality to ethics, can we explain the transformation and especially find a reason?
A set of questions that will be another text and an opportunity to deepen our presentation of Rene Girard.
