What would Pascal be without faith ? Laurent Bove looked at these moralists who, from Vauvenargues to Camus, rethought the Pascalian doctrine of “ second nature », nature after the fall, from a materialist and atheistic angle, which turns religious pessimism into optimism of action.
The Pascalians of immanence
A specialist in Spinozism, Laurent Bove devotes himself today to those he calls “ pascalians of immanence » — Vauvenargues, Camus, but perhaps also the painter Bruegel — who have in common that they think from a Pascal tinged with Spinozism. According to Pascal, the “ second nature », human nature after the fall due to original sin, overthrows and destroys the first, and the break in communication with Being is definitively consummated. This second nature – which is the place of the primacy of bodies, of desire, of chance, of power relations, of imagination and custom – is a world devoid of principle and end. De-finalized, de-regulated human activity is necessarily crossed by violence and illusion: “ it is death that leads a human life “.
The philosophical singularity of “ pascalians of immanence », it is, while accepting the radicality of Pascalian’s observation, to reveal the positivity of the negative. They carry out a sort of reversal of the reversal which, far from bringing nature back to its principle, opens up to the powerful reality of the primacy of life and its affirmation. Having lost its object, the activity of desire becomes a perfection, a power to act, an active force of constitution which ceaselessly constructs human reality on the edge of the void of nature. The activity of desire is thus the production of being, perpetual generation, a living virtue on which Vauvenargues like Camus will base an ethics and a policy for courage, what Camus calls “ the harsh ethics of the builders “.
For the Pascalians of immanence, it is therefore the “ entertainment » which is the true, the true constituent power of politics and history. A story without purpose, divided between the domination of the multiple figures of nihilism who haunt it, appropriate it and exploit it, and the resistance to this domination. In this interview, Laurent Bove discusses this alternative path to modernity.
Interview, shooting and editing: A. Suhamy
Interview transcript
Vauvenargues and Camus, Pascalians of immanence
Vauvenargues and Camus are great readers of Pascal, but in both cases they are located in what Pascal calls second nature, that is to say nature after the fall. What remains in some way in this second nature are reversal effects: reason is erased in favor of imagination, the body takes precedence over the mind, death has primacy over life. This second nature is, in a certain way, death leading a human life. The Pascalian problem then consists of escaping this face-to-face encounter with the dead: hence entertainment as diversion.
This entertainment, Pascal tells us, is constitutive since from the imagination, from the effort that beings make to persevere in their being, something of the order of reason is reborn. However, Pascal must stop there because otherwise he would have to attribute to man, and to men together, a constituent power. He clearly feels that the problem is there: noticing this positivity being born, he shows that on the contrary it pushes man a little deeper into entertainment and into nothingness, which for him is divine punishment.
From this plane of second nature, Vauvenargues and Camus search for what can give positivity to this world without transcendence. From this point of view, we find a unity in the two works: it is the activity which was the very expression of decay, since it is a question of being active in order to hide from the fact that we are nothing more than death in progress, which will be revalued. In other words, they are readers of Pascal who do not accept second nature nihilism. They wish to restore positivity to this finitude and to do so construct a plan of immanence that must constantly be constructed and reconstructed: they are Pascalians of immanence.
Vauvenargues’ philosophy is essentially a philosophy of activity: fire, air, spirit, light, everything lives through action and, he says, we were wrong with Pascal to condemn this activity because it is what constitutes the very constitution of the human being as a human being. It is this very activity that Vauvenargues calls virtue.
We find in Camus the idea of living virtue – with a rather Nietzschean reference – which is the very movement of superabundance from which a human world can be constructed and rebuilt: it is the harsh ethics of builders. Indeed, Meursault’s adventure is not primarily that of the man of the absurd. It is a retrospective reading, like that of Sartre, based on the theorization of the absurd in the Myth of Sisyphus. But if we study theStranger and the character of Meursault from the preceding texts, it is not the absurd which is dominant but a philosophy of the body and – to use a title from Camus – of marriage with the world: this is the thread of the immanence which is first.
The text of theStranger shows a journey which is a bodily experimentation of immanence. Meursault, through his encounters, first with Marie, then the bad encounter with Raymond the pimp, will be led onto the path of crime: there is an experiment for Meursault of his ways of being affected which transform him and put him on a path that could be called “ ethics “. It is a path where his affects will become active until the great anger he becomes in the prison by rejecting the priest. It’s almost a communion, he wakes up with stars on his face, and a true wisdom which is a feeling of eternity. The absurd has dissolved in this story: Meursault is not the symbol of the absurd character. L’Stranger is above all an adventure of the body. Revolt in Camus is not a moral revolt: it is the creation, or invention, of an ethical being where the creation of beings and values are correlative. The primary value is the right to be treated as an equal. Monstrosity envelops the promise of a human community that does without transcendence.
Indeed, one could think, and Camus himself thought and felt it, that this plane of immanence is a plane of collapse, of “ collapse », of human life. Camus says it: we must find a form of transcendence in this plane of immanence. But this transcendence is naturally not a true transcendence: it is a rupture, it is a superabundance, it is this excess in immanence which produces the light of equality and the construction of common life.
Vauvenargues and the revolt
Modernity constructs, according to Camus, an essentially instrumental reason which envelops a logic of domination. Camus’ answer lies in this idea of a living virtue. We already find this in a magnificent text by Vauvenargues entitled “ On hidden miseries “. It is a text of political philosophy which recounts his walks in the Luxembourg Gardens. He sees men without passion in the main aisle: these men, these “ happy ”, subsumed their passions under a logic of calculation and rational interest. From this point of view, the main aisle is quite monolithic.
The Luxembourg garden, Vauvenargues shows, really lives from its paths diverted from modernity. We see all the passions rumbling there: women rejected in opprobrium, old men excluded from society, the frustrated and repressed passions of youth, the desire for glory which has not found satisfaction in this society. Vauvenargues describes the pleasure he found in these seditious companies. These circuitous paths of the Luxembourg Gardens envelop the promise of a sociality to come, of a revolt which, as in Camus, will claim the measure of equality.
The painters’ model
Camus refers to Piero della Francesca in his early works very explicitly, particularly in The Flagellation of Christ and to The Resurrection. This led me to think that Camus wanted to write a novel in the way that Piero himself had painted, for example, The Resurrection. What Camus says about Piero’s resurrecting Christ is that he no longer has the look of a man. Piero describes a being whose bodily power he emphasizes, the beyond of the all-too-human human. This makes us think of the adventure of Meursault: this character who will go through the absurd, who will transform his own body in his encounters, his ways of being affected, until what we could call a form of resurrection . Meursault goes through the death of the Arab – because he too dies in this crime -, then resuscitates in prison until he is able to understand the adventure of his own life and move on to the level of testimony. He thereby becomes a creator.
Camus, wanting to write a novel like Piero painted, adopted the famous American method which fragments his writing. If we were interested in Piero in the 1930s it was because at that time we were making the connection between Piero della Francesca and Cézanne’s painting: what Piero’s painting brought was the expression of the painting itself to the detriment of the psychological expression of the characters. But this is exactly what we find in theStranger : it is an expressive testimony of human life to the detriment of the expression of the interior life of the characters. It is an adventure of the body which is affirmed and an ethical adventure which leads this body from death to resurrection, and to creation.
From Bosch to Brueghel
Bosch paints an upside-down world that can only be read, and seen, negatively. Brueghel paints, for his part, the reversal of the reversal: this gives the same figures and at the same time another meaning. Indeed, when Brueghel paints spring he is in reality creating the theory of domination. Spring is life reborn, but we see people at work who are bent over, submissive. It is a world of domination completely contradictory to the promise of spring. In The Fall of Icarus he paints, not the fall of Icarus, but the end of the world of the fall, of sin: a boat sets off towards the horizon to discover and explore the new world. Brueghel paints the fall of the fall: the end of one world for the benefit of another. We are really between Bosch and Brueghel in the mutation of the meaning that we can bring to second nature.
This is what I find in other forms in Vauvenargues and Camus. There is a Spinozist thread there which exists before and after Spinoza. There is in fact a way of feeling and thinking about the world, which Spinoza carried out on the theoretical level at his peak, but which existed before him and which can exist afterwards among those who do not read Spinoza.