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Intellectuals and the Real
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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All the languages of the world, I believe, have words to distinguish, among men, between intellectuals and manual workers: the former use their brains more than their hands; the latter use their hands more than their brains. Since the beginning of time, many men could easily be classified in one or the other of these groups (and certainly many others could fall into the intermediate zones between the two poles). For example, “ intellectuel “ and “manoeuvre“ are very old words in the French language, direct heirs of Latin words designating the brain and the hand.
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- Copyright © 1976 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
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1 It is enough to read the articles on the " Sciences " in contemporary encyclopedias to become aware of the confusion of mind on these crucial problems. One finds there in effect inextricably tangled texts which insist on the complexity of the problems posed. These very unclear texts do not help the researcher at all and send him thus back to the current returns from his own laboratory. The great philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whose work is in other respects remarkable, has only added to this dark disorder.
2 I take the liberty of referring the reader to my book Comment mon cer veau s'informe, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1974.
3 Astronomy cannot experiment, that is create at its pleasure identical systems. It can only observe. But nature furnishes identical systems for its observation. Its situation is thus the same as the experimental sciences although experiments cannot be done.
4 Claude Tresmontant, Sciences de l'univers et problèmes métaphysiques, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1976, p. 9.
5 Ibid., p. 17.
6 Groupe de réflexion sur l'enseignement des sciences humaines et économi ques dans le second degré, Rapport du président, chapter 1.
7 Notably the report " Science, technologie, société ", Dec. 1975.
8 It will not be totally useless for the reader to call to mind the order in which the sciences were born and the order in which they entered into the secondary school and the teaching of young adolescents and children.
9 Today's child is more helpless than his distant ancestors for two series of factors: his genetic code, dominated more and more by conscious thought, has become weakened; the technical environment, established by experimental science, has destroyed the natural environment to which this instinctual genetic code had adapted itself by " natural selection ".
10 It is only very recently in France that among intellectuals there has arisen a fairly widespread current of opinion interested in comparisons between the ideals and the realities of the revolutions whose inspiration is Marxism. See for example Gérard Chaliand, Mythes révolutionnaires du tiers monde, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1976, and Jean Ellenstein, Le phénomène stalinien, Paris, Grasset, 1974.
11 This fact is beginning to be recognized by French intellectuals, notably through the action of professors Jean Bernard and Jean Hamburger. See espe cially Jean Hamburger, L'homme et les hommes, Paris, Flammarion, 1976.
12 See above, the section on Rationality and Experimental Science.
13 In his above-cited book, Tresmontant shows (Chapter 1) that the world-views prevalent among today's intellectuals still derive from beliefs in the eternity of a self-maintaining universe.
14 104 different atoms are known today, of which 83 are stable in the long term and 21 are unstable (radioactive). All are formed of nuclei (protons and neutrons) and of electrons. But the number of these electrons can go from one (hydrogen) to 103 (lawrencium) and perhaps more. In the whole universe, only hydrogen and helium atoms are abundant. The others are very rare: 85% of the atoms existing in the universe are hydrogen atoms, 14% are helium atoms, 0.66% are oxygen atoms (with 8 electrons). All the other elements thus form only 0.034% of the total. The structure of the atom teems with mystery. For example, the number and the nature of the " particles " into which neutrons and protons split when they are ejected from the atomic structure, or the fact that the neutron is 1,819 times heavier than the electron, and the proton, 1,816 times heavier (1,819 and 1,816 are very strange numbers for human rationality). As another example, the filiation of electrons into photons. Etc…. See for example Albert Ducrocq, Les éléments au pouvoir, Paris, Julliard, 1976.
15 Alfred Kastler, Cette étrange matière, Paris, Stock, 1976.
16 Jean Hamburger, op. cit., p. 154.
17 See Alfred Kastler, op. cit., especially pp. 12 and 261. Kastler sums up his thought on this point as follows: " Just as I believe, by simple scientific objectivity, in the existence of a finality, so do I doubt that this finality is unique and is centered on the inhabitants of this earth ", p. 261.
18 It has been evident for a long time that this method, this technique of discovery of the real leads by priority to causal descriptions which present the chronology of evolution as a necessary and sufficient explanation of evolution, and distracts from the questioning, equally fundamental nevertheless, beyond the how of things to their why.
This is evidently of great importance, but is rather well-known and debated so that I will not take it up here.
19 Thus, among innumerable examples, the successive " appearance " of different atoms, the beginning and end of the human species, the birth and death of Christ, the mystical experience of Catherine of Siena or of Jacques Maritain…
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