The French philosopher François Jullien, on July 6 in Paris (France). Ilan DEUTSCH
The philosopher François Jullien (Embrun, France, 1951), a specialist in Greek and Chinese thought, holds the chair of alterity at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Foundation in Paris, where he welcomes us in an immense glass-enclosed hall that seems straight out of a Jacques Tati movie.
He has just published
De vera vita.
Little Treatise for an Authentic Life
(Siruela), where he questions a common fear in these times: that of living an existence devoid of content, buried by routine, alienated by the forces of the market and technology, and turned into a simulacrum or , worse still, in a vulgar parody.
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Ask.
In the book he says that suspicion is "perhaps the oldest in the world."
Where does the obsession with living a full life in the face of a supposed second-class existence come from?
Response.
I don't know if I would talk about obsession, which seems to me to be a somewhat harsh word, but it is a topic that appears very early in the history of thought.
Plato already talks about it, although for him authentic life is the afterlife, what comes after death.
Rimbaud, Proust and Adorno also mention the subject, but do not spend much time on it.
I wanted to turn it into a tool for existential and political reflection.
P.
You wrote the book just before confinement.
Has the pandemic intensified our aspiration to that full life?
R.
The pandemic has led to confuse life and vitality, the living and the vital.
For me, only the first counts.
I have wanted to distance myself from both Platonism and Nietzsche's exuberant vitalism.
Life is not just vitalism, it goes much further.
Q.
How have the last two and a half years changed us?
R.
We are witnessing an imposition of virtuality, of permanent connection, when what should be done is to reawaken the power of life without folding it into the digital.
Loss and absence are very important: they intensify authentic life even more, they make it emerge.
The comfort of the virtual seems dangerous to me.
“Self-help seems deplorable to me, because it is in no way equivalent to thought.
It is a plaster, a band-aid”
P.
With the successive crises and the war in Europe, many of us had the feeling of finding ourselves inside a fiction.
He writes that this feeling of simulacrum is not new.
A.
That's right.
The risk is that this leads to disenchantment, a generalized disappointment, when what it is time to do work in our lives, reform them.
In Europe, philosophy has avoided talking about how to live because it didn't have the tools to do so.
Traditionally that question had been left in the hands of religion.
With the decline of the religious in our societies, who is assuming that role?
The self help.
P.
In the book you are very critical of the so-called personal development, which you call pseudo-philosophy.
Are their authors charlatans?
A.
Yes. They have created a market for happiness, a single thought that sells us false wisdom about life.
I find it deplorable, what they do is in no way equivalent to thought.
They are neo-stoic or neo-epicurean, at best, but without the rigor that the Greeks had.
For me, thought must resist the market, trade.
Self-help is little more than a plaster, a Band-Aid.
Q.
You use Marxist terms like alienation or reification.
Why are they relevant to describing the world today?
A.
I am in favor of updating them, they describe well the tendency to retreat that I describe and the need to resist it.
The difference with the nineteenth century is that alienation then had a face.
Now it no longer has it: it is everywhere, linked to the ubiquity of the globalized market and the incessant connection.
It is not a question of criticizing technology, but of understanding what new forms of alienation it has provoked and to what extent it is more difficult to combat them than in Marx's time, because alienation no longer has the aspect of the bourgeois owner.
"Living is a contradictory experience, which takes place in the chiaroscuro of passions, in the confusion of feelings"
Q.
Is there a good way to live and a bad way?
R.
That's what the Greeks believed, but luckily we have already overcome their ethics of happiness.
It is better to get away from that permanent dramatization.
I do not believe in happiness or misfortune.
Don't ask me if I'm happy, it seems like a meaningless question to me.
Nor do I believe in the goals that many set for themselves to give meaning to their lives.
Rather, I believe in having resources, in having a series of tools so that life becomes more intense.
P.
In this aspect, you defend the usefulness of emotions, which have not been of excessive interest to philosophy, having considered them "a sudden outpouring that dethrones the autonomy of the subject."
R.
Emotion supposes a setting in motion, the emergence of an intensity that seems positive to me.
We must accept that living is a contradictory experience, which takes place in the chiaroscuro of passions and the confusion of feelings.
Among other things, I miss emotions in politics…
“I preferred the Italians singing opera on the balconies than the French applauding the doctors.
It seemed like a simulated emotion to me.”
Q.
Really?
Aren't there already too many?
R.
There is a lot of irrationality in political discourse, but not an emotion that mobilizes and stimulates you.
It is a sensitive issue, because emotions can lead to destructive manipulation, as happens in dictatorships.
But I believe that there is also a fertile political emotion, like the one that arose in the first days of the French Revolution, a collective feeling that makes our lives put in tension again.
The disaffection for politics that we observe today prevents a start-up, a new take-off.
Q.
Don't you think that the pandemic has been a political cycle very marked by emotions?
R.
The pandemic could have sparked that mobilization, but it did not.
At least in France, where politicians were limited to giving subsidies.
He preferred Italians singing opera on balconies than Frenchmen applauding doctors.
It seemed like a simulated emotion to me.
And that can be nice and even interesting, but in no case is it political;
it is not a mobilizing emotion that reactivates the political.
We missed that opportunity and I feel disappointed.
Q.
You are a strong defender of European cultural identity.
Do you think it will survive the latest crises?
R.
The question of our cultural identity is never dealt with in Brussels or Strasbourg, when it is fundamental.
Europe needs a second life.
It must defend its freedom and its diversity.
Their languages, for example.
I am a great militant of European languages against globish [the English spoken by non-natives to understand each other].
You have to bet on French, on Spanish, on Catalan.
And not because of chauvinism, but because they are languages of culture that give us resources for understanding.
I am fully convinced that the world still needs Europe.
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