When triumphant liberalism imposed unbridled individualism on us, with a conception of man reduced to his worst aspects, the urgent need was to affirm our original community and rebuild our social solidarity. But when social movements awaken and we witness the return of the state, the urgent need becomes the affirmation of individual freedom and the avoidance of destructive idealism, while preserving the duality, even the duplicity, of our human reality. Just because there is something universal does not mean that there is nothing particular. There is the collective, but there is also the individual. Of course, there are not only bodies, there are also relationships between bodies, but there is still the part that belongs to the body. There is no dignity outside of belonging to the human community, but this dignity nevertheless resides in our individual freedom and responsibility; freedom constituting the very essence of love and its contradictions, a thousand miles away from the idealized freedom of liberalism.
Everything is matter, everything is interconnected, but not everything forms an indistinct unity. There are different dimensions, a plurality of systems and organisms, there are living beings, there is information, there is language, there is mind (in every word, every thought). There is not only the identity of all with all, there is also the difference of each with each. There is not only what brings us together, there is also what divides us, even opposes us, and after wanting to bring everything together, we will have to separate again.
It is impossible to get by without a minimum of dialectic, where one can be solitary without being individualistic, just as one can be sociable without playing as a team, or even speak on behalf of everyone without taking anyone's opinion into account. It is all the more difficult to refute mystical impulses and the identification of the individual with the collective, as fusional unity ends up encompassing the entire universe. We must therefore go back a long way to try to understand how one divides into two, how life opposes entropy, man opposes animals, the individual opposes the collective to which he belongs; an original separation that constitutes the tragic nature of life, from which no utopia can deliver us, because it is also the price of existence. Against mystical tendencies and the Spinozist temptation, we must understand what opposes us to the universe of which we are nevertheless a part and reestablish a strict dualism between matter and perception, between the energy era and the information era, and between the individual and the collective.
In a way, I am fulfilling here, albeit in a very abbreviated form, a promise I made to Jacques Robin to give my version of the adventure of the universe, which differs from his at the end of his life, carried by cosmic impulses that I refuse to accept, perhaps in order to be more faithful to his central intuition, which he defended throughout his life, of a radical break between the world of energy and the world of information, as well as the necessity of a plurality of systems. One could say that this is about the impossible existence of the whole of all wholes, of a totality of totalities, without denying the existence of effective systems and totalities, as if there were only isolated bodies.
Nothing could be easier than refuting dualism: there is only one world, whether it is made of matter or is simply a vision of the mind, there is no room for space “and” thought, no room for bifurcation, rupture, it is either one or the other. On the contrary, dualism is what thinks both dimensions at once, their heterogeneity and their interactions, which are lost when they are reduced to the original unity, a dark night where all cows are black. What is surprising is that there can be a link between the bird's-eye view, where differences cancel each other out or merge, and collective outpourings where identities temporarily merge into the group. In both cases, however, we need to be able to think about the difference behind the façade of unity, to think about both the individual and the collective in all their complexity in order to restore a more realistic anthropology in its very contradictions (and its gendered nature), which is neither individualistic liberalism nor communitarian totalitarianism, but an ecology of diversity that unites us as separate beings and does not mutilate our dual nature.
How can dualism be conceivable? How can two emerge from one? Life itself provides the answer, at least with cell division, if not with sexuality, but more fundamentally with the emergence of life itself and of the mind, from the universe but against it, one might say, introducing this division, rather ironically, as a nostalgia for lost unity. We can certainly unite the material universe and the world of life or information as its own reflection, but in this kind of self-awareness, reflection brings about a radical break between subject and object, between consciousness and the world it questions, between the finality that reverses the course of time by turning toward the future and the causality that comes to us from the past. Life is not matter and cannot be reduced to chemical reactions; that would be to miss the fact that living is an evolutionary process of learning and adaptation to the environment. Similarly, the mind is a blank page looking in from the outside and cannot be reduced to the body. Thought and matter are not two sides of the same reality; they are not the same thing expressed in two different ways, but rather incommensurable realities, like truth and knowledge. Information shows, through its transmission, that it does not depend on its material, which cannot be reproduced, but only on its form, which can be reproduced. Better still, information as improbability is opposed to material probability, just as life is defined by its opposition to entropy and by its increasing complexity. The world of information and the mind is not the material world or the world of energy, and that is why the world of life is not the world of chemistry that serves as its support.
What is life, really? It is reproduction and homeostasis, persistence in being and evolution through information, that is, the struggle against death and entropy through the memory of adapted reactions selected by their performance in competition for resources and adaptation to changes in the environment. So how can we say that we are one with the entire universe when we oppose its force of dispersion with all our faculties, how can we say that we are part of the same adventure as the river that carries us along when we struggle upstream, when we build step by step while time destroys everything in its path, when the improbable and the complex spread across the planet when everything should return to dust in the indifference of the probable, the equalization of temperatures, the smooth surface of a motionless lake that nothing would disturb, in a deathly silence... No, there is no unity of life and matter, but a separation between the percipiens and the perceptum, an opposition between the subject and the object, like the predator and its prey, even if we try to blend into the background! Far from a passive contemplation of celestial mechanics, we find ourselves standing against the sky that condemns us without mercy, nostalgic for unity and persistence in being, which is a lost battle. All life has something tragic about it that transcends it and propels it beyond itself. It is not a long, quiet river, no, but rather a constant struggle, and it is with our fists raised that we can defy the entire universe, life stolen from death that gnaws at us, time saved from nothingness and which we will have made our own for eternity despite everything that denies us.
Does this mean that we could become one with nature as living nature and a world of ends? We can certainly see a certain unity between predator and prey, but it is not without an original hostility! Of course we are alive, not just matter, and we are connected to other living beings, dependent on the entire biosphere, its nutrient and climate cycles, all kinds of balances, circuits, and flows of matter and energy controlled by flows of information. We can legitimately feel that we belong to the great chain of life. Yet everything that connects us to the whole of the living world does not prevent there being even more that opposes us (like the subject to the object), both bringing devastation to it and becoming responsible for it. It is not because we must take care of the world that there is no radical separation between nature and culture (united as separate). The evolution of life takes place against physical degradation, and the adventure of life is therefore not to be confused with the adventure of the universe, any more than our destiny is to be confused with the destiny of animals or with some unfindable original harmony.
Human life is not animal life; it is not even a social life, it is a cultural and political life, a desire for recognition, a jealous desire and a need for love rather than the satisfaction of instincts and the tyranny of pleasures, the subject of language and enunciation, a fascination with stories and myths, a symbolic world that has as much existence as the living world, embodied in institutions, books and now digital networks. The reason or madness to which language gives access are of the order of the superego, the inhibitory brain, the control of animal instincts by a higher rationalizing reflection formed by a long learning process that recapitulates the entire history of humanity. Man breaks away from animality, he explicitly distinguishes himself from it, claims it, as a matter of dignity. Life is already governed by information and memory, but language introduces a new break through a kind of radicalization. By simply improving the transmission of information and its cumulative memory, it multiplies signs and brings the world of the mind to life. The world of discourse imposes its existence even though it is outside the world of life, to the point of disrupting its vital balances. It is remarkable that this technical domination of the world has its origins in the materialization of thought and knowledge in language. While language gives us a name, a place, an identity, and connects us, it also divides us between the subject of the statement and the subject of the utterance. Here again, one is divided into two.
Are we at least united with all human beings, as humanism teaches us? All of us? No, except in an abstract way, because reality is one of relentless struggles between left and right, between the dominant and the dominated, between men and women who tear each other apart. The devil continues his work of negativity, introducing division everywhere. There is real solidarity between us, which does not depend on what we think, but there are also deep divisions between classes, genders, religions, and localities, divisions that cannot be suppressed without damage, even if they can be overcome on a case-by-case basis. Worse still, there is no substantive unity with the collective, at most identification with the leader, because most of the time it is the enemy or the competitor who creates the collective from outside, rather than a shared identity, an individual essence, a supposed mutual recognition, or even the bonds of friendship that arise from it. The collective can certainly be ideally formed around a goal to be achieved, by working as a team, but internal tensions can only be overcome by external tensions. While it is absolutely crucial to recognize the importance of the collective, this should not obscure what is irreducible to the collective in the individual, nor should it blind us to the excessive enthusiasm of any group in the process of merging. We must come together to overthrow the old order, but not to rediscover a supposed original unity or ideal bonds, and other configurations may justify other alliances where yesterday's friends become tomorrow's adversaries. This is inevitable as long as there is no human nature or given truth and decisions must be made in the absence of sufficient information and on the basis of political power relations.
We must occupy this space not for the union of all, but for division, for the expression of the negative, of real contradictions, for the transformation of the world and the struggle against its injustices, which is enough to mobilize us. We are right to revolt, but it is not enough to revolt in order to be right and move from one error to another. As Pascal says (IV.2.148): “Error is not the opposite of truth. It is the omission of the opposite.” Our reality is indeed one of spiritual, dialectical materialism. We must take into account its two sides, take into account the contradiction between the individual and the collective: not the state or the market, but the state and the market, democracy and social movement. The subject is always the disruptor, who poses himself in opposition, the exception to the rule.
The demon of division nevertheless provides part of the answer to what needs to be done, as opposed to utopian constructions that are necessarily totalitarian due to their unilateral and uniform nature. The prerequisite, in fact, is to recognize the plurality of systems, what Jacques Robin called a plural economy, which has always existed, at least in the form of a mixed economy. In practical terms, this means that we should not so much aim to end globalized capitalism as prevent it from monopolizing the field and begin to organize its exit by building local alternatives, opening up the field of possibilities, in the plurality of values, social roles, and lifestyles, as opposed to a new standardized human being and much more than liberalism can allow. This implies a completely different strategy of networks and collective action without the need for centralization, but with local collectives (cooperatives and local currencies) linked by alternative circuits.
Of course, we must put a limit on the demon of division and our infinite dispersion by recognizing the need for collective organizations due to the existence of systems on which we depend, effective totalities, circuits of energy, matter, and information that control them, and finally, systemic constraints. which does not mean turning them into totalitarian systems, since there are several of them and they have relative autonomy and their own functioning. The paranoid unification of all systems into a megasystem is an absurdity, a figment of the imagination, a pure abstraction as impossible as the set of all sets or even monopolistic capitalism without competition or internal divisions! Nor is it because they are integrated into the same body that we can identify the blood system, the immune system, and the nervous system, which are clearly differentiated. It is not an imaginary effect to distinguish them, while confusing them would be to deny the organization that brings them together in common action. Similarly, levels of reality are very real, as are surface effects. The skin really does separate, like any membrane. There is no single unified and undifferentiated block, but different totalities of individuals and organizations with varying degrees of autonomy and breaks in causality.
In this divided world, can we still imagine ourselves participating in the human adventure, claiming a collective history and a common future? In a way, if one can say so, but only by referring to a “revolutionary tradition” that is contradictory in terms, because it is not so much a question of going in the direction of history, for that we are not needed, but rather to resist the excesses of our time and reject the unacceptable, correct our mistakes, give meaning to the nonsense of the world, bear witness to our inadequacy in the face of the universal and the disharmony of existence, the failure of communication, the absence of dialogue. Real life is absent outside the mirages of love, which usually ends badly. There is no end to alienation or to history, only problems to be solved, wrongs to be righted, balances to be restored, opportunities to be seized, and disasters to be avoided. This negative side, which is that of ecology and reason, is much more constructive than the positive side of utopia, which stops at nothing to force reality to conform to its nightmarish dreams.
Of course, we need collective goals, hope, and the expression of our solidarity, but we must never go too far, or the disappointment will be all the greater. It is better to return to our very real divisions, in our daily lives and at the local level, to the reappropriation of practices by the actors themselves, starting from what does not work. There is already much to be done in creating new possibilities and providing alternatives where there were none, without having to promise a transformed humanity or an ideal society where all hearts would be united, when we should instead admit our irreconcilable dissensus and our own irreparable limitations. Not everything is negotiable; there are incompatibilities and radical differences. We cannot ally ourselves with just anyone, under any circumstances. Yet it is with all these different people that we must build a society, but there is not only the One, there is also the Other.
A party proves itself to be the winning party only because it splits into two parties. In doing so, it shows that it possesses within itself the principle it previously fought against and has eliminated the unilateralism with which it first entered the scene. The interest that was initially divided between itself and the other is now entirely directed toward itself, and forgets the other, since this interest finds in itself the opposition that absorbed it. At the same time, however, the opposition has been elevated to the victorious higher element and is represented there in a clarified form. In this way, the schism arising in one party, which seems to be a manifest misfortune, rather reveals its fortune. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit).
