Faced with life, Jean Cau has discovered the anti-life — an ebullition of moods, doctrines and trends. A type of human that is in a state of perpetual agitation, fuelling his own febrility with utopias:
Our decadence is nothing but the sharp and prying, slimy and slippery, subtle and ironic, powerless and wordy, jealous and critical triumph of the ever-denying mindset.
Whenever life, defined as strength and health, sinks into abatement, the ill person, sitting in an armchair, suddenly acquires great intelligence. They reflect and discover ‘valid reasons’ for their current state, wondering whether health is not basically something rather detestable. After a while, they convince themselves that this is indeed the case; and soon enough, they make others ill as well, persuading them that it is in such a state that supreme good actually lies.
Jean Cau states: ‘Ideas hate life, and so does intelligence’. It is his book’s leitmotiv. He thus advocates an aesthetical conception of life and not a moral one. The Beautiful, he says, matters more than the Good. All things considered, is great vice not preferable to small virtue? ‘To be worth in evil what one would be worth in good — why not, if there is value in it? What is irremediable, however, is when one is not worth anything at all’. This is why one must wish ‘to die in a state of beauty, just as an absolved Christian does in a state of grace’.
Hence the fundamental idea according to which art and history are but one and the same thing. The only difference between a genius and a great man lies in the material that they work with. Just like life itself, masterpieces ‘are, indeed, causeless. They do not persuade; they strike’. A man and a people are masterpieces to be sculpted and, likewise, seek to tear themselves away from matter. When artists are too numerous, however, the work is necessarily formless.
Jean Cau contrasts what is ‘true’, in which he detects nothing but illusion, with what is real. Hence his response to his contradictors:
Your invincible dialectics, quibbler’s discourse, massive treatises and computers stand helpless in the face of all that, within me, burns your words to ashes.
Jean Cau perceives two tendencies that clash in our world: a tendency of life, which leads towards difference, and a tendency of death, which leads towards equality:
Let us make love, not war, but where exactly shall we do so? In the Sargasso Sea. And how shall we make love? Through a sorry mixture of psychedelic orgies. To do so is to forget that love and war have not always been in a state of enmity.
In a world devoid of enemies, there are no friends either: one only loves insofar as one is also able not to love. And when everything is of equal value, everything is worthless:
War used to result in young people’s deaths. True enough. Sustained peace, however, kills and drains youth. Furthermore, war singles out the Others. The enemy. I am only an individual to the extent that Others exist and my very being is exasperated all the more strongly and intensely when this Other chooses to object and espouse self-denial. Enemies are a necessity: they hold me to my own definitions, force me to embrace myself, and compel me to draw the line that demarcates me from the rest and within which my difference is very much alive.
In a further essay entitled Ma Misogynie,222 Jean Cau mentions the specific characteristics of both men and women. He praises love and motherhood:
Every mother who brings a child into this world believes herself to be giving birth to a king. Looking at his own child, every father considers it to be the Lord of the Earth. All of this is very well and good, very powerful and very sweet, and very un-democratic. An ever-indignant and masochistic mother, democracy demands equality for all her children, even at the cost of their resulting worthlessness. Should any one of them break free and raise himself above the latter, the wicked mother proceeds to scold him and says: “Be like your brothers! Be their equal!”
The Church, which once served as a last recourse for some, is also in a pitiful state because of its current self-reflection phase. Jean Cau scoffs at Christianity, which he perceives as a ‘religion of slaves, one that shall forever be impacted by its own origins’.
A Maoist clergyman? What can be more natural than that? The recipe is a very simple one: take a priest, remove his faith, and you’re left with… what exactly? One hell of an egalitarian democrat! The staunchest of them all. It should come as no surprise that so many communist leaders, beginning with Stalin, were once seminarians themselves. […] Christianity’s egalitarian message is in the process of coming true and it is for this very reason that the Church is dying.
The West is thus facing a ‘breakdown of faith’:
We are men of faith that have been left faithless, men that can be approached and beseeched: “Give us some faith, we beg of you!” We so long to say “yes”, but to whom? To what? For we do not ask the priest, the leader, the master to “discuss” matters with us, to understand us and to play what is basically the role of a social assistant; all we want is for them to be there, to stand there in an attitude of great severity or goodness.
Marx Was a Frustrated Bourgeois
What Jean Cau reproaches the Judeo-Christian conception of morality for is the fact of ‘preaching the guilt of the strong and the innocence of the weak’. In Le meurtre d’un enfant, he already wrote:
Yes indeed, whenever the victim cries “Go on, strike, I care not!”, the tormentor is bound to find himself quite annoyed, all the more so when he is entirely in the right and the victim is guilty of absolute misbehaviour.
In Les écuries de l’Occident, the parable of the Master and the Slave is extensively developed. The Slave has managed to persuade his Master that his domination, meaning the very fact of being the Master, is a source of misery to him as well. The Master eventually believes him and acquires the conviction that ‘all great existence is one of guilt’. And ever since then, ‘the brotherly Slave has been driving a nose-ring through the Master’s nostrils’.223
Jean Cau writes:
It is impossible, by definition, to equal others from above, which accounts for the fact that egalitarian societies are necessarily pervaded by tedium or despair. Love supposes the presence of a Master. Once there are no longer any genuine Masters, the entire society is one of slaves. Those slaves, however, are all sad and hollow. In this kind of society, the bourgeois is nothing but a promoted and shameful slave.
From Spengler’s perspective, ‘Marx was a frustrated bourgeois; hence his hatred of the bourgeoisie’. In Jean Cau’s eyes, the bourgeois is a ‘promoted slave’ longing to forget his own origins and convinced that the sole fact of owning property bestows nobility, when, in actual fact, what he presents us with is nothing but the latter’s detestable caricature (which is all the more serious since this caricature is not always perceived as such and the dissenter himself ends up believing in this equivalence of aristocratic and bourgeois values, albeit in an effort to contest).
The bourgeoisie sells everything; its members are genuine mercantile scoundrels. And democracy itself is embodied by the bourgeoisie. On its part, a people may, even when aspiring to baseness, still be able to recognise grandeur. Bourgeois democracy? Never.
The morality of the bourgeoisie is that ‘it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion’, which is the equivalent of forgetting that the dog will eventually die as well and that ‘before his death, the lion was indeed alive; and lion-like’. In ancient times, ‘both aristocrats and peasants were willing to come to terms with having their sons led to their deaths. The bourgeois, on the other hand, “harbours” his children because neither courage nor heroic obedience are part of his legacy. The aristocrat says: “If my son is a coward, he sullies my good name”; as for the peasant, he states: “If I fail to defend my land, my enemy will claim it”. By contrast, this is what the bourgeois says: “If my son is killed, who will be my heir and succeed me in running the business?”’.
The transition of an aristocracy rooted in the people (for whom politics stems from the sovereign function) to a mercantile bourgeoisie (for who
m politics belongs to the economic sphere of influence) also corresponds to a passage from ‘great politics’ to ‘petty politics’:
How does one define politics? Is it the fact of governing people? I, for one, say that this is not the real issue and that it is a matter of providing them with reasons to live and to die, of bestowing self-forgetfulness upon them. And people’s reasons to live have always been identical to their reasons to die. To remove either lot is to collapse the other.
In yet another essay entitled Pourquoi la France,224 Jean Cau condemns America, the archetypal bourgeois land and mother of ‘the young leftist bourgeoisie which, through its utopian internationalism and absolute lack of responsibility’, plays the same role in relation to Europe on the level of nations as the bourgeoisie does on the class level in relation to aristocracy.
Jean Cau has never forgotten that he was born in the Aude department in 1925 and that he comes from a long line of peasants. This is what he writes in Les écuries de l’Occident:
My very origin has determined my belonging to the people. My ancestors have been peasants since the dawn of time, and the very nobility of my lineage and race is epitomised by the fact that we have never bought nor sold anything. Our hard work, yes indeed — for what we give is our own blood.
The age that we now live in, however, is one of weakness: this is what all the insufficient self-manifestation has come down to:
Any show of power leads to finger-pointing and is soiled with spittle. Children, women, delinquents, criminals and madmen loudly protest their own “oppression” and disarm the hand that either beat them or protected them. And the more one’s head is gnawed at by the termites of weakness, the more one’s body is disintegrated by violence. Echoing the pace at which our laws grow ever weaker, the criminality in our walls gains in strength, manifesting its presence with the loud sound of solicitor-like chattering. Such is also decadence: the death of laws, the proliferation of jurisprudences and the confusion of thoughts.
Firmness is, instead, doubly strong:
Just imagine a President of the Republic who would declare: “Should France be attacked, either by conventional means or using an atomic bomb, I solemnly swear that it would rather choose death than submission!”. Such a president would render our country invulnerable. “Let us abstain from attacking these madmen”, the enemy would say, “they are capable of sacrificing their lives to the very last man in the name of honour”. I invite the one who would seek this supreme office to ask himself: will he, or will he not, pick liberty over life and death over slavery? His response to this single question should decide which direction our votes take. My own voting slip would bear the name of anyone who would say: “I promise you death over dishonour”. Admittedly, of course, my candidate might end up only securing two votes: his own and mine.
Our Future’s Secret
There is a key philosophical thread that runs all the way through Jean Cau’s books, one that is easily identifiable. He remarks:
Nietzsche and Marx have inaugurated the formidable debate of our new age.
At the end of 1968, André Malraux confided in Encounter magazine:
During the 19th century, the prevailing prediction was that the 20th century would be an internationalist one. The facts, however, have shown that it was not Marx, but Nietzsche that had been right all along.
Nietzsche chose to add a subheading to Thus Spake Zarathustra — A Book for All and None. In reference to Les écuries de l’Occident, Jean Cau has stated that the book ‘targets anyone who, upon reading it, finds himself feeling concerned’. As for Nietzsche, he once wrote: ‘The atmosphere rare and pure, danger lurking near, and the spirit filled with joyous wickedness. ’Tis all of a piece’. Jean Cau expands on things:
Where am I? I am where I choose to be, in the place where I feel free and unclad, in the crisp air that immerses me and strengthens me with the knowledge of harsh and therefore perfectly untimely blatancies.
Crisp and light air and untimely considerations: Nietzsche’s presence is implicit in this statement. In this book punctuated with aphorisms, he dances to the point of breathlessness.
In the space of ten years, Jean Cau has become the intelligentsia’s bad conscience. His former admirers feel that he has ‘lost some of his talent’ ever since he ceased to align himself with them. In L’Express, a certain author made the following melancholic observation:
This is not the first time that the Left has, along the way, lost one of its brilliant worker’s sons who society has exceptionally allowed to get too close to the banquet.
Cruelly alone (or almost), Jean Cau laughs it off. He writes:
In France, the leftist adventure through our cultural regions is an absolutely hilarious one. The Mandarin culture has approached the people with a facial expression akin to that of a modern clergyman on his way to a brothel, and the result was almost instantaneous: only the middle and petty bourgeoisie proceeded to treat itself to the cultural revolution one celebrated in some temples. On their part, the people simply went to the Châtelet,225 on a fishing trip or calmly turned on their TV sets.
Les écuries de l’Occident is marked by a certain kind of despair. However, Bernanos is quoted in it as well:
The highest form of hope is despair, overcome.
One even prophesies in it:
In the name of God, it is all too late. In the name of man, it was and still is mere utopia. For both these reasons, let us approximate and declare that it is the irrational that awaits us next, just around history’s corner.
And here is Jean Cau’s conclusion:
The throats of millions of men are filled with the chant that they long to intonate. One, however, wonders what words should be included to coincide with the rhythm and what exact Jerusalem one should be walking towards. Therein lies our future’s secret.
Prior to the cleaning of his stables, Augeas226 spent thirty years living in the most unpleasant conditions. And it is now the ‘stables of the West’ that await… Hercules’ coming.
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Les écuries de l’Occident, an essay by Jean Cau. Table Ronde, 255 pages.
La grande prostituée, an essay by Jean Cau. Table Ronde, 164 pages.
Le temps des esclaves, an essay by Jean Cau. Table Ronde, 200 pages.
Pourquoi la France, an essay by Jean Cau. Table Ronde, 158 pages.
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Raymond Ruyer
The two main topics that characterise Raymond Ruyer’s books are, on the one hand, the intricate connections between the consciousness and the body and, on the other, the philosophy of biology, to which he adds further essays with a focus on the philosophy of values, cybernetics, utopia, and other subjects as well. Nevertheless, the very subtleness of his thought, his concern to avoid fashionable trends (which come across as ‘unilateralisms’ in his eyes), and his broader rejection of ideological systems can, at times, render his works disconcerting, perhaps even difficult to access when read by those that lack sufficient awareness.
In 1963, he would state: ‘Reading Kierkegaard227 aroused an intense sort of repulsion in me’. Raymond Ruyer, who was born in 1902, admits having already been ‘shocked’ by existentialism in his youth. The scandal, in his eyes, does not lie in the ‘world’s absurdity’, nor in the fleetingness of our existences; it is, instead, embodied by the fact that at the very instant of his passing, man is still unable to pierce the veil of the basic enigma:
If what God is offering us is a voyage through existence, he has not given us the slightest instructions on how to proceed.
In his Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure228 (Alcan, 1930), which follows a first essay on Cournot,229 he distances himself from dogmatic spiritualism:
Man can never exit the sphere of the universe of forms through faith or the impulses of his own heart; nor, for that matter, through metaphysics.
At the same time, however, he accuses materialism of dissolving the originality and perhaps reality of ‘human feelings, pleasure and pain, which
paganism once actually deified, rendering them realities in the full sense of the word’.
His approach is therefore a purely phenomenal one. Behind the systems, what he seeks are simple and objective truths:
It is of little importance whether a tree is an idea, a material machine, a system of monads, a perception or an essence: what does matter is the description of its roots, its liber, its leaves and its flowers; the fact that by looking at it, what I receive is a mere image of it and not the tree itself. Nothing matters much as long as all the structural details agree.
In his eyes, the universe is but an ensemble of ordered forms. One’s knowledge of these forms exhausts all of reality: ‘There is no mysterious residue whatsoever’. He writes:
The universe and all forms arise by proving their presence; nothing exterior could ever justify them.
In parallel to this, he attempts to demonstrate both the convenience and sufficiency of structural descriptions:
A tree is merely a system of curves and torsions affecting space-time. And thanks to the sensorial modulations of my cerebral cortex, the conscious representation that I have of the tree is, likewise, nothing but a structural system.
There is thus a correspondence between the structures. To travel and to prepare an itinerary on a planning scheme are, for instance, two different things; yet there is structural analogy between the two actions:
Casting a look upon the map is equivalent to looking at the landscape: it guides our behaviour in the same manner.
The Philosophy of Structure
Soon enough, however, Mr Ruyer realises that there is a fundamental difference between the mechanic and the organic. One is not reducible to the other since, in the organic sphere, there is interaction between all present elements, so much so that the whole in itself is more than the mere sum of its parts. Consequently, consciousness is not mere ‘knowledge of something’ but, indeed, a global reality that not only joins together all the knowledge one has acquired in the very nature of their being but also adds something further to it.
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 8
