Public Enemies (20 page)

And the feeling, exhausting in the long run, that one is a vague organic hodgepodge whose controls are gradually failing.

No
Dionysian laugh
to enliven things; these days, Nietzsche’s philosophy seems to me like futile provocation, a joke in bad taste.

Nothing, therefore, would give me greater pleasure than to venture into this “region of the soul” where positivism, you may think, is bound to be out of its depth. The fact remains that the Judaism without God you outline still seems rather mysterious to me. Nor am I convinced that it is likely to elicit much sympathy from Chief Rabbi Sitruk, but I’ll let you worry about that.

The first thing would be to give up the idea of linking Man to the Universe. Man would go on being this fragile, medium-size object somewhere between quarks and spiral nebulae.

Such a philosophy (let’s call it that, if you prefer the term to
religion
) would merely connect men to one another, afford them common values. In terms of ambition, this is limited but I grant that at least it would be a start.

In passing, I have to say that your position is the exact antithesis of a rapidly expanding spiritual movement (the
only expanding spiritual movement in Europe these days) based on ecological fundamentalism mixed in some cases with left-wing alter-globalization [the global justice movement] and in others with half-witted New Age cults. This movement does attempt to connect Man to the Universe, to give him a place in the “balance of nature” (and in particular to keep him in that place); but it also has very little to say about anything that might connect men to each other. Deep down, it’s a sort of neopantheism. It’s comforting to know that the Jews will be there to oppose it.

At heart, you’re not all that far removed from positivism.

At least from the positivism of Auguste Comte (who is, after all, the founder of the movement). But when he tried to found his “religion of humanity,” there was an immediate schism and he lost half of his disciples—including all those who had any intellectual weight in France at the time. I think he managed to marry two or three working-class couples (in spite of his attempts to gain the sympathies of Napoléon III and later Tsar Alexander I, the working classes remained his
target market
); the “religion of humanity” had some fleeting success in Brazil. And then, sometime around 1900, it all fell apart.

Saint-Simon, Pierre Leroux, in fact a whole host of social reformers in nineteenth-century France, had also envisaged founding a religion without God; they had even less success.

And yet Auguste Comte had a number of fine ideas. I remember a conversation I had once with Philippe Sollers (it’s been a while since we mentioned him; we’ve missed him) in which we agreed on the fact that prayer could have immediate psychological benefits, independent of the existence of the addressee. I didn’t tell Philippe at the time, because I didn’t want to traumatize him, but that it’s a typically Comteian idea. I even find it surprising to find Comte, who could have had no knowledge of Eastern meditation techniques,
talking about posture and breathing control. A truly original mind who drew much from his own resources.

Chesterton, always shrewd, notes that the most reasonable aspect of the positivist religion is what, at first glance, might seem the most baroque: the creation of a calendar. With a starting point and its markers, annual, weekly, daily. Everything is good that sets man in an ordered, meaningful time frame; one distinct from the physical time of his old age and decline.

In spite of all this, Comte, as I said, failed; failed totally and miserably.

A religion with no God may be possible (or a philosophy, if you prefer; something that carries in its wake, like so many delightful corollaries, a code of ethics, a sense of “human dignity,” maybe even a political theory,
if compatible
). But none of this seems to me to be conceivable without a belief in eternal life, the belief that in all monotheistic religions acts as the great
introductory offer
, because once you’ve conceded that, and with this as your goal, everything seems possible; no sacrifice too great—viz., Islamic suicide bombers.

Comte wasn’t offering anything like that; all he proposed was one’s theoretically living on in the memory of mankind. He gave the concept a slightly more high-flown twist, something like “incorporation into the Great Being,” but it didn’t change the fact that what he was offering was a theoretical perpetuation in the memory of mankind. Well, that just didn’t cut it.

Nobody gives a shit about living on in the memory of mankind (not even me, and I write books). So why do I spend so much time
correcting my proofs
? I don’t know, Proust was surprised that he did. I suppose it must have something to do
with the idea of a
job well done
, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a Protestant work ethic; the Protestant work ethic simply opportunistically seized on an age-old propensity in man, who is essentially an animal that
makes
—tools or machines—which, to my mind, includes books, and perhaps this is at the root of our inability to understand each other. I don’t confer on books a sufficiently lofty, sufficiently
sacred
status; for me books are something to be remade generation after generation, none of them gifted with eternal status, and take my word for it, this is something that does not suit me because I’ve been lying through my teeth since the start of this paragraph; as an author, of course I want to
live on
, but on the other hand I haven’t lied at all, since it’s true that I would rather really live on, to live on physically, as physically as possible.

One of my favorite parts of
The Genius of Christianity
is probably the bit where Chateaubriand launches into a stylistic comparison of Homer and the Bible, his goal being to show that if Homer’s writing is extraordinarily beautiful, the Bible is even far superior. He deploys all the insight and the analytical acuity one has every right to expect from a writer who is himself a phenomenal stylist, and he carries it off; I have to admit, it is an astonishing victory, he is completely convincing. Carried away by his enthusiastic apologia he seems unaware of the danger that gradually mounts with every page: by heaping praise on the literary qualities of the Bible, one comes to think of it as a literary work—one of the finest in the history of mankind, it’s true, but nothing more. Exalted, at times extraordinarily moving, but at heart a fiction, and nothing more than fiction.

There you are; this, at the end of the day, is what my reading of the Bible led me to conclude. Oh, it happened gradually, over a period of years. But by dint of comparing translations,
choosing the “best one” (my criterion was not accuracy, but purely aesthetics), by continually rereading my “favorite passages.”

And it’s true that I persist in separating the discussion of literature—however intensely emotional, however symbolically profound—from the discussion of truth. In saying that, I feel rather narrow-minded, an old Calvinist stick-in-the-mud.

(But that is possibly exactly what I am.)

(There are worse things, it has to be said; all you have to do is consider the famous Proposition 7 that concludes Wittgenstein’s first work: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”)

The fact remains that I find myself in exactly the same position of philosophical uncertainty.

So, to sum up. The rights of man, human dignity, the foundations of politics, I’m leaving all that aside, I have no theoretical ammunition, nothing that would allow me to validate such standards.

This leaves ethics, and there, I do have something. Only one thing, to be honest, luminously identified by Schopenhauer, and that is
compassion
. Rightly exalted by Schopenhauer and rightly vilified by Nietzsche as the source of all morality. I sided—and this is hardly news—with Schopenhauer.

It does not allow for the establishment of sexual morality, but that is something of a relief.

It does, however, allow one to establish justice and law. Quite easily, but without the picturesque elaborations of Kant (I use the word
picturesque
in the strongest sense of the
term; one could compare reading Kant with a hike through the Alps. It’s very curious that he never left Königsberg,
^*
an area that is quite flat. Much more than Nietzsche, he gives me that intoxicating impression of rarefied air, of gazing out to the farthest distances …).

It remains a mystery that Schopenhauer alludes only with a vague terror to the
origin of compassion
. For after all compassion is merely
a feeling
, something fragile on the face of it, although it seems to be reborn, naturally, from generation to generation.

Not to mention the question that is the logical corollary: What if compassion disappeared?

I think, in that case, humanity too would disappear.

And that the disappearance of such humanity would be a good thing.

And that we would have to wait for the arrival of another intelligent species, more cooperative, better adapted by its original tribal organization to ascend toward moral law (by which I mean a species rather superior to primates).

To break with humanism, therefore, does not imply breaking with morality, which stems from the apparent organization of the world into separate beings—whether
or not
these beings are mortal.

In short, I’ve just been won round to a sort of absolute. I think that’s rather good news.

It is a limited absolute (moral law is rigorously applied but in a limited domain). What can be said of what remains outside?
Free will
? Yes, I’ll go for that; I’ll assume it has some meaning. So, free will for everything that is morally indifferent (which, it has to be said, represents rather a lot and the great tragedy of our overpoliced societies seems to me excessively limit the domain).

It’s not that I really believe in this notion of free
will
. Spinoza’s argument (conscious of desires but not of their cause, hence the sense of freedom) still seems to me irrefutable. And if I gently nod my head when I hear the phrase used around me, it’s so as not to
make things worse for myself
; so that the discussion doesn’t
get out of hand
. Because I’ve noticed that people in general are very attached to the fiction of
free will
and that, maybe, it is a useful fiction.

Human beings, in general, are possessed of a surprising ontological self-importance.

But they can have their
free will
, since they’re so keen on it; it’s like a decoration, it doesn’t cost much and people seem to like it.

On condition you don’t think it through too clearly, it’s no problem.

No problem at all.

There I go, I realize I’ve started writing “human being,” slipping into the third person.

It’s not that I feel
superior
; please, don’t think I mean it like that.

It’s more a sort of disparity, the persistent impression I’m playing a role.

As you know, for years now I’ve lived abroad. There are certain clichés associated with the French (fine wine, fine food …) and more than once, to grease the wheels of social communication, I have found myself
overplaying my role as a Frenchman
. I have launched, apparently enthusiastically,
into extravagant eulogies about Madiran wine or some food or other I’ve only just heard about.

For similar reasons, though more rarely, I have found myself
overplaying my role as a man
—manifested a passion that I did not feel for Aston Martins, Pirelli calendar girls, and Michel Platini’s
^*
free kicks.

And I feel more than capable (I would undoubtedly do it if I were ever faced with an audience of aliens) of
overplaying my role as a human
.

Even in the absence of an intergalactic audience, I cheerfully accept that aping human behavior in everyday life can be signally helpful. It is only in my books—the only things that really matter to me—that I insist on maintaining a certain
critical distance
with regard to humanity.

Given this preoccupation, which is important to me, I’d like to stress that I have always been on exceptionally good terms with Jews. I am happy to listen to people talk about what it is like to be Jewish (as though this had a particular relevance to being human). In doing so, I implicitly recognize a certainly validity in the Jewish destiny.

I’ve been a great deal more impatient with Russians when they try to talk to me about the “Slavic soul.” I have been very quick, believe me, to send them packing.

Not to mention the Celts or the Corsicans, but now we’re just getting ridiculous.

It is really quite frightening, this affectation peculiar to
middling-size mammals, interchangeable on the face of it, to form specific species. This is in stark contrast to the attitude of my dog (a middling-size dog—his legs are a little stubby, but he’s middling-size nonetheless), who recognizes dogness in Chihuahuas and Dobermans alike.

I think, in dealing with humanity, it’s important from time to time to take a
bacterial point of view
; I specifically use bacteria because some are toxic while others are beneficial (the ones you get in yogurt, for example).

And ask yourself, from a point of view that is as detached as possible, whether humanity is an experiment worth pursuing; weigh up the merits and the drawbacks and, based on the results, try to make the necessary adjustments.

I don’t know much about the history of philosophy, but it seems to me that, after a certain point, there was a regression; that Kant managed to elevate himself to a viewpoint independent of the contingent conditions of humanity, yet valid “for all reasonable beings”; and that since that point we have curtailed our ambition a little too much.

This is a pity, since, having created characters in novels, I know that humanity is treacly; it’s like putting your hand in a jar of molasses, you start finding excuses for everyone and you get bogged down in a senile sickly-sweet niceness.