Where do our philosophical institutions come from?

Investigating the origins of French philosophical institutions, P. Macherey shows that they are rooted in the need, common to counter-revolutionaries and republicans of the XIXe century, to invent a national tradition in order to counter the Enlightenment compromised in the excesses of the Revolution and to support the national identity in formation.

The question posed by Pierre Macherey in this work is the following: does doing philosophy in France mean doing philosophy? French “, that is to say sacrificing, most often without knowing it (or without wanting to know it…) to the dogmas of a certain national tradition ? And if this is the case, is not the first of these dogmas precisely the forgetting of this tradition, or rather its repression, in favor of the proud affirmation of a thought which experiences itself as stateless, atemporal, exclusively adjudicable by the abstract criteria of a purely rational evaluation ?

Philosophy and history of philosophy

It is naturally to the university institution, and to its members, that Pierre Macherey first asks: what is doing philosophy in France, what, in particular, is doing there? history of philosophy ? The answer that the collection of articles brought together in the volume offers to this question is expressed both in the objects of study chosen themselves, and in the way of treating them. First of all, there is displayed the conviction according to which there is not, and cannot be philosophy out of one history of philosophy : in other words, without a vigilant inscription of concepts and philosophical theses in the context of wars, crises, political and social confrontations, institutions and ideological projects which, fundamentally, constitute the matrix, as much as they determine the function. The reminder of such a methodological position will undoubtedly seem trivial to some, but the game is far from being won on this question in the field of national academic production. Pierre Macherey chooses to show, rather than demonstrate, concretely, that is to say historically, where such a presupposition leads us when it becomes a principle of self-critical examination of the French philosophical institution by one of its members. most respected, and whose personal journey, from the École Normale Supérieure to the Sorbonne and beyond, perfectly embodies the honorary course national.

At first glance, it is a question, against academic tradition, of crossing the border which separates the “ big “, THE “ true » philosophers selected by the University, of these minors whose claims we refuse to take seriously, or quite simply the philosophical value, for various reasons but far from always being good. Often, in particular, the rejection seems due to the fact that the authors in question have compromised too much in politics, or more precisely with power, from which the prudent philosopher is supposed to know how to distance himself: such are Sieyès, Bonald, Cousin, De Maistre, Saint-Simon. Sometimes again, it is the hybrid character of their works, where the philosophical content mixes with other aims (literary, historical, religious) which has prohibited their admission into the temple: thus Chateaubriand, Renan, Guizot. Finally, others were unable to claim it because of the eclectic, and let’s say it, somewhat incoherent nature of their thinking, like the autodidact Proudhon. But in Macherey’s eyes, what seems decisive, and oh so symptomatic, remains the fact that the “ philosophers » were unable to see, behind a form resistant to academic formalization, inelegant in the eyes of lovers of systems, conceptual innovation. Not even Marx, carried away by the momentum of the polemic against the author of Philosophy of poverty, and perhaps also by one’s own prejudices… Questioning this unthought, and (re)coming to the texts from this perspective, makes it possible in particular to strongly nuance the hasty categorizations which lead to classifying a particular thinker among the “ reactionaries » while another will be considered as “ innovative »: the historical perspective induced by these successive studies, on the contrary, reveals an unnoticed complexity. It allows, in an astonishing crossover, to show (chapter VII) how Bonald’s idea arises, extremely innovative, and one could say sociologizing, according to which thought is a phenomenon which occurs not on the level of consciousness, but on that of power relations ; or how (chapter VI) the very ambiguity of Chateaubriand’s faith, despite his stated desire to return to “ TRUE » Christianity, is above all revealing of the religious feeling specific to its time. From which we see that Marx, particularly in his relationship to Proudhon, can incidentally appear as a representative of the spontaneous arrogance of stamped philosophers, and conservative thought as the bearer of the heavy tendencies of modernity on an intellectual and emotional level.

THE “ big » authors are therefore not absent from this reflection, but often appear in a somewhat unusual light. It is essentially read, and misread, by Cousin who did not know German, then distorted (unless he was understood too well) by Proudhon, that Hegel is introduced in France and in the collection of Macherey ; similarly, it is to the extent that his concepts are in some way acclimatized, and put by Barni at the service of a new form of secular, rational and republican morality, that Kant in turn makes his appearance. The same goes for Spinoza reread by the Saint-Simonians.

Among the “ big », Marx is ultimately the subject of special treatment. It seems that an underlying concern led Pierre Macherey to return to the different elements which, among the Ideologues, among Saint-Simon, among Proudhon himself, could have been reflected by Marx in such a way that they appear in the form of traces in his conception of ideology, social relations, property. In this way, the work sometimes appears as an essay on the genealogy, still very Althusserian, of the specifically French sources of Marxian thought.

The philosophical institution

But through this journey of authors, Pierre Macherey intends above all to go back to the historical origins of the national institutions in which philosophy was made and is still made: the École Normale Supérieure, the high schools, the universities, such as they were thought of in their time, that is to say through the prism of their contemporaries who promoted them, legitimized them, made them work, or even of those who trained alongside them, or against them. This insight supports what ultimately constitutes the central hypothesis of the work: the idea according to which the character irreducibly “ French » of our philosophy is rooted above all in the collectively felt urgency of “ end the Revolution “, and this, for different but convergent reasons: first, to break away from this parenthesis experienced as destructive during which philosophy, that of the Enlightenment, seems to have irremediably compromised with the excesses of democracy, of dechristianization, Terror ; then, and consequently, to reconnect “ the thread of a ‘tradition’ invented retroactively for the needs of the cause » (Preface, p. 9), not only by the counter-revolutionary fringe of thinkers seeking to rehabilitate an eternal Christianity guarantor of order, but also by the republican promoters of a philosophy which would have this French, that it would be likely to strengthen the national identity in formation.

From this point of view, the constitution of a French philosophy appears less as the spontaneous product of a common history, which could be traced back to Descartes, than as a deliberate enterprise, although sometimes contradictory in its presuppositions and in its expectations, an enterprise overdetermined through and through by the essentially political nature of its issues. Philosophy was thus closely linked with the promotion of the republican form of organization of collective life, and its early academic institutionalization made it very early on one of the pillars of the new national order.

In this context, the movement to professionalize philosophical activity, which makes the philosopher a teacher and an educator, has given it an increasingly central and precise social role: that of promoting the new form of citizenship, of cementing the the attachment of individuals to the national community and its values. So much so that after 1870, and for a long time, “ the republic, in France, was the republic of philosophy professors » (p. 382). From this perspective, one of the most crucial and striking aspects of the reconstruction is the trajectory, inseparable from the “ become-french » of philosophy, named afterideology, which, invented by Destutt de Tracy in 1796, “ pejoratized » by Napoleon and Marx, and little by little used everywhere, turns out to have become not only a concept, but above all a massive social fact. Macherey shows along the way how, little by little, French society forged a theoretical awareness of itself which is that of a “ communications company “, that is to say a common space centered around the circulation of ideas, a field in which the collaboration of minds must above all take place, constantly threatened by the risk of dogmatism, of a devitalized republican catechism. It is in this imaginary framework that the centrality of the character of the philosophy professor can be understood, of whom Macherey, in his extremely suggestive introduction, recalls the impossible task, inherited from this whole story: to direct young minds towards the truth, towards a certain duties, while developing their critical thinking… all things which perhaps cannot be taught, and undoubtedly in a classroom less than elsewhere. Failing to remove the professor from this position which is so uncomfortable and so recognizable, at least the work has the immense merit of showing where the difficulty comes from, of understanding how and why we arrived at this point. there.