The Elegance of the Hedgehog Page 4
In short, in my opinion the cat is a modern totem. Say what you want, do what you will with all those fine speeches on evolution, civilization and a ton of other “-tion” words, mankind has not progressed very far from its origins: people still believe they’re not here by chance, and that there are gods, kindly for the most part, who are watching over their fate.
4. Refusing the Fight
I have read so many books . . .
And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading—and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she’s been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.
This morning, as it happens, I am standing, puzzled, in the kitchen, with a little book set down before me. I am in the midst of one of those moments where the folly of my solitary undertaking takes hold of me and, on the verge of giving up, I fear I have finally found my master.
His name is Husserl, a name not often given to pets or to brands of chocolate, for the simple reason that it evokes something grave, daunting, and vaguely Prussian. But that is of little consolation. I believe that my fate has taught me, better than anyone, to resist the negative influences of world thought. Let me explain: if, thus far, you have imagined that the ugliness of ageing and conciergely widowhood have made a pitiful wretch of me, resigned to the lowliness of her fate—then you are truly lacking in imagination. I have withdrawn, to be sure, and refuse to fight. But within the safety of my own mind, there is no challenge I cannot accept. I may be indigent in name, position, and appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivalled goddess.
Thus Edmund Husserl—and I have concluded that this is a name fit for vacuum cleaner bags—has been threatening the stability of my private Mount Olympus.
“All right, all right, all right,” I say, taking a deep breath, “to every problem there is a solution, no?” I glance at the cat, waiting for a sign of encouragement.
The ungrateful wretch does not respond. He has just devoured a monstrous slice of rillettes and, henceforth imbued with great kindliness, has colonized the armchair.
“All right, all right, all right,” I say again like an idiot and, puzzled, I stare at the ridiculous little book.
Cartesian Meditations: Introduction to Phenomenology. It quickly becomes clear, given both the title and the first few pages, that it is not possible to read Husserl, a phenomenological philosopher, if one has not already read Descartes and Kant. And yet one discovers with equal alacrity that even a solid mastery of Descartes and Kant will not, for all that, open the doors to transcendental phenomenology.
This is a pity. Because I have great admiration for Kant, for a number of reasons: his ideas are an admirable concentration of genius, rigor and madness, and however Spartan the prose might be, I have had no difficulty in penetrating the meaning. Kantian texts are great works of literature, and I would like to prove this by demonstrating their ability to pass, with flying colors, the cherry plum test.
The cherry plum test is extraordinary for its disarming clarity. It derives its power from a universal observation: when man bites into the fruit, at last he understands. What does he understand? Everything. He understands how the human species, given only to survival, slowly matured and arrived one fine day at an intuition of pleasure, the vanity of all the artificial appetites that divert one from one’s initial aspiration toward the virtues of simple and sublime things, the pointlessness of discourse, the slow and terrible degradation of multiple worlds from which no one can escape and, in spite of all that, the wonderful sweetness of the senses when they conspire to teach mankind pleasure and the terrifying beauty of Art.
The cherry plum test is held in my kitchen. I place the fruit and the book on the Formica table, and as I pick up the former to taste it, I also start on the latter. If each resists the powerful onslaught of the other, if the cherry plum fails to make me doubt the text and if the text is unable to spoil the fruit, then I know that I am in the presence of a worthwhile and, why not say it, exceptional undertaking, for there are very few works that have not dissolved—proven both ridiculous and complacent—into the extraordinary succulence of the little golden plums.
“I am truly up the creek,” I say to Leo, because my skills where Kant is concerned do not amount to a hill of beans when I contemplate the abyss of phenomenology.
I am left with no alternative. I will have to enlist the help of the library and attempt to unearth an introduction to the matter at hand. Ordinarily I am very wary of such glosses or short cuts which tend to place the reader in the iron grip of scholastic thought. But the situation is far too grave for me to allow myself the indulgence of equivocation. Phenomenology is beyond my reach and that I cannot bear.
Profound Thought No. 3
The strong ones
Among humans
Do nothing
They talk
And talk again
It’s one of my profound thoughts, but it came from another profound thought. It was one of Papa’s guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach teach the teachers; and those who can’t teach the teachers go into politics.” Everyone seemed to find this very inspiring but for the wrong reasons. “That’s so true,” said Colombe, who is an expert at fake self-criticism. She’s one of those who think that knowledge is power and forgiveness: If I know that I belong to a self-satisfied elite who are sacrificing the common good through an excess of arrogance, this liberates me from criticism, and I come out with twice the prestige. Papa also tends to think like this, although he’s less of an idiot than my sister. He still believes that something known as duty exists and although in my opinion that’s just pure fancy, it protects him from the cynic’s debility. Let me explain: nobody is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics can not relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the word has meaning and, when things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude. “Life’s a whore, I don’t believe in anything anymore and I’ll wallow in that idea until it makes me sick” is the very credo of the innocent who hasn’t been able to get his way. That’s my sister all cut out. She may be a student at the École Normale, but she still believes in Santa Claus, not because she has a good heart but because she is totally childish. She started giggling like an idiot when Papa’s colleague came out with his fancy phrase, as if to say, “I’m an expert on the mise en abyme,” and that confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a long time: Colombe is a walking disaster.
As for me, I think that his sentence is a bona fide profound thought, precisely because it isn’t true, or at least not entirely true. It doesn’t mean what you think it does at the outset. If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that’s not even the problem. What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine
talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.
5. In a Sorry State
After one month of frenetic reading I come to the conclusion, with immense relief, that phenomenology is a fraud. In the same way that cathedrals have always aroused in me the sensation of extreme light-headedness one often feels in the presence of man-made tributes to the glory of something that does not exist, phenomenology has tested to the extreme my ability to believe that so much intelligence could have gone to serve so futile an undertaking. As this is already the month of November, there are no cherry plums available. At times like this therefore—eleven months a year in actual fact—I have to make do with dark chocolate (70%). But I know in advance the outcome of the test. Had I but the leisure to bite into the standard meter, I would slap myself noisily on the thighs while reading, and such delightful chapters as “Uncovering the final sense of science by becoming immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon” or “The problems constituting the transcendental ego” might even cause me to die of laughter, a blow straight to the heart as I sit slumped in my plush armchair, with plum juice or thin driblets of chocolate oozing from the corners of my mouth . . .
When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world?
Let’s start with the first question.
For millennia now, by way of “know thyself” to “I think therefore I am,” mankind has been rambling on about the ridiculous human prerogative that is our consciousness of our own existence and above all the ability of this consciousness to make itself its own object. When something itches, a man scratches and is aware that he is scratching. If you ask him, What are you doing? he’ll reply: I’m scratching myself. If you push your questioning a bit further (are you aware that you are conscious of the fact that you are scratching yourself?) he will again reply, Yes; thus, ad infinitum to as many are-you-aware-and-conscious questions as you wish. Does this, however, leave man with any less of an itch to know that he is scratching and is aware of it? Can reflective consciousness have a beneficial influence on the order of the itching? Nay, not in the slightest. Knowing that it itches and being conscious of the fact that one is conscious of knowing it has absolutely no effect on the fact of the itching. As an added handicap one must endure the lucidity that results from this wretched condition, and I would wager ten pounds of cherry plums that such lucidity merely serves to exacerbate an unpleasant condition which my cat, for example, can eliminate with a quick flick or two of his rear paw. But it seems so extraordinary to us—no other animal is capable of this and in this way we escape our own animal nature—that as human beings we are able to know that we are in the process of scratching ourselves; this preeminence of human consciousness seems to many to be the manifestation of something divine that is able to escape the cold determinism in us to which all physical things are subject.
All of phenomenology is founded on this certainty: our reflective consciousness, the sign of our ontological dignity, is the only entity we have that is worth studying, for it saves us from biological determinism.
No one seems aware of the fact that, since we are animals subject to the cold determinism of physical things, all of the foregoing is null and void.
6. Homespun Cowls
Which brings us to the second question: what do we know of the world?
Idealists like Kant have an answer to this question.
What do they answer?
They answer: not a great deal.
Transcendental idealism holds that we can know only that which appears to our consciousness, that semi-divine entity that rescues us from our animal self. What we know of the world is what our consciousness can say about it because of what it has perceived—and nothing else.
Let us take an example, at random: a sweet cat by the name of Leo. Why? Because I find it easier with a cat. And let me ask you: how can you be certain that it really is a cat and, likewise, how can you even know what a cat is? A healthy reply would consist in emphasizing the fact that your perception of the animal, complemented by a few conceptual and linguistic mechanisms, has enabled you to constitute your knowledge. But the response of the transcendental idealist would be to illustrate how impossible it is to know whether what we perceive and conceive of as a cat—if that which appears to our consciousness as a cat—is actually true to what the cat is in its deepest being. It may well be that my cat—at present I perceive him as an obese quadruped with quivering whiskers and I have filed him away in my mind in a drawer labeled “cat”—is in actual fact, and in his very essence, a blob of green sticky stuff that does not meow. My senses, however, have been fashioned in such a way that this is not apparent to me, and the revolting blob of green sticky stuff, deceiving both my disgust and my earnest trust, is masquerading before my consciousness beneath the appearance of a silky and gluttonous house pet.
So much for Kantian idealism. What we know of the world is only the idea that our consciousness forms of it. But there is an even more depressing theory than that one, a theory that offers a prospect even more terrifying than that of innocently caressing a lump of green drool or dropping our toast every morning into a pustular abyss we had mistaken for a toaster.
There is the idealism of Edmund Husserl, which as far as I’m concerned now signifies designer-label homespun cowls for wayward monks sidetracked by some obscure schism in the Baptist church.
According to Husserl’s theory, all that exists is the perception of the cat. And the cat itself? Well, we can just do without it. Bye-bye kitty. Who needs a cat? What cat? Henceforth, philosophy will claim the right to wallow exclusively in the wickedness of pure mind. The world is an inaccessible reality and any effort to try to know it is futile. What do we know of the world? Nothing. As all knowledge is merely reflective consciousness exploring its own self, the world, therefore, can merrily go to the devil.
This is phenomenology: the “science of that which appears to our consciousness.” How does a phenomenologist spend his day? He gets up, fully conscious as he takes his shower that he is merely soaping a body whose existence has no foundation, then he wolfs down a few slices of toast and jam that have been nihilized, slips on some clothes that are the equivalent of an empty set of parentheses, heads for his office, and then snatches up a cat.
It matters little to our phenomenologist whether the cat exists or does not exist or even what the cat is in its very essence. The indemonstrable does not interest him. What cannot be denied, however, is that a cat appeared to his consciousness, and it is this act of appearing that is of concern to our good fellow.
And what is more, an act of appearing that is quite complex. The fact that one can explain, in detail, the way in which one’s consciousness perceives a thing whose very existence is a matter of indifference is simply extraordinary. Did you know that our consciousness does not perceive things right off the bat but performs a complicated series of operations of synthesis which, by means of successive profiling, introduce to our senses objects as diverse as, for example, a cat, a broom, or a flyswatter—and, God knows, isn’t that useful? Have you ever wondered why it is that you can observe your cat and know at the same time what he looks like from the front, behind, above and below—even though at the present moment you are perceiving him only from the front? It must be that your consciousness, without your even realizing it, has been synthesizing multiple perceptions of your cat from every possible angle, and has ended up creating this integral image of the cat that your sight, at that moment, could never give you. And the same is true for the flyswatter, which you will only ever perceive from one direction even though you can visualize it in its entirety in your mind and, oh miracle, you know perfectly well without even turning it over how
it is made on the other side.
You will agree that such knowledge is quite useful. We can’t imagine Manuela using a flyswatter without immediately rallying the knowledge that she has of the various stages of profiling necessary to her perception. Moreover, you can’t imagine Manuela using a flyswatter for the simple reason that there are never any flies in rich people’s apartments. Neither flies, nor pox, nor bad smells, nor family secrets. In rich people’s apartments everything is clean, smooth, healthy and consequently safe from the tyranny of flyswatters and public opprobrium.
But enough of phenomenology: it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hard-core autism that no real cat would ever importune.