The double look on complex dimension
Abstract: Many of our motivations are wrongly considered natural. I take 3 examples: staying healthy, protecting nature, upholding equal rights. Behind them lie artificial ideals: Eternal Life, the Natural History Museum, Democratic Equality. Confused with principles truly constitutive of human nature, these ideals crush with their weight many aspects of our lives. They flatten our … Read more
Abstract: Is the ideal an engine of social change or only a symptom? The double look shows that it is both, in a metastable cycle, allowing for example to understand that the abolition of slavery or the death penalty can be imposed on a population that appears to be unfavorable but which implicitly accepts the … Read more
Abstract: The ways of theorizing the relationship between matter and spirit are divided into three great eras: incompatibility, assimilation, coincidence. The third starts today. 1st era: incompatibility The insoluble contrast between material and spiritual has been recognized since the dawn of humanity. The approaches used during the first era, until the middle of the twentieth … Read more
Abstract: Wokism marks the resurgence of idealism. Great pendulum movement in response to deconstructivism. But something has changed. Those who practice wokism have changed. New generation of individualists who no longer try to collectivize the ideal but to impose it in its intact, radical version. The pendulum movement is also from the soliDary to the … Read more
Discordance at the pediment Of the french republican trio equality-liberty-fraternity it is the third that has been most often erased and replaced by a less discouraging noun: charity of Christians, comradeship of communists, solidarity of socialists, humanitarian of NGOs. Less discouraging? Yes, fraternity is so easy to sully. Collectivism quickly derived into groupism. That of … Read more
Invading neurons No doubt you have noticed like me this growing undesirable effect of the popularity of neuroscience: it frequently replaces the classical paradigms of psychology by their opposites, without real experimental demonstration, as if reading functional MRIs taught us the springs of the human personality… Examples flood our journals that have become neuro-psychological. The … Read more
The fragmented war Cliché: Democratic regimes reduce the risk of war and tyrannies amplify it. Let’s correct: Between these regimes, the level of war is shifted. It would be absurd to claim that democracies are peaceful societies. On the contrary, conflicts roam freely there, much more freely than in any other regime, without being resolved. … Read more
Through the ‘Microreflections’ Alexandre Lacroix’s excellent ‘Microreflections’ conceals a particular nugget: ‘To put an end to the original sin of philosophy’. Alexandre presents ideals as the deities of an inaccessible world tyrannizing thought. The mind would only use a degraded version of it, and whoever observes this mind would only see the even more degraded … Read more