Recently the illusion is called happy globalization

The two paths of philosophy

By André Glucksmann

Plon, 291 pages, 21 euros

The philosophy is never as well scope. Long exercise required of users of the Terminal class, it has become popular. There is more, it wants, at any age, to accompany the difficulties of life. Long reserved for arcane books and journals, it is expressed in the bestsellers and has its public review: "philosophy Magazine." This contemporary promotion is for individual confusing by the multiplicity of choices available to it, while there is more response in tradition or ideological and religious patterns. Philosophy became research of an art of living his everyday life, without involving major collective commitments.

This game, it risks losing its soul. The last book of André Glucksmann is part of this movement while recalling that philosophy is an exercise that has its risks and its requirements. Witness the life (and death) that is at the origin: Socrates. If, in Socrates, the philosophy is a way of life, is not a consolation. It is a mission that he has set the oracle and who, for which it is, the duct to question all those who claim to know, mock to test that applies this knowledge, which will lead to a sentence of death, assumed and claimed. It is far from an exercise where it would be to give good reasons for to avoid the anguish of having to choose.

Being a philosopher, for André Glucksmann, reproduce the gesture of Socrates in each different contexts. For him, the experience of the 20th century is that of totalitarian regimes. The XXea asked the choice between two types of philosophers: the philosopher road companion, fellow of Nazism as Heidegger, or companion of road of communism as virtually all French intellectuals at a time in their lives. To this figure rises to dissident, figure of Socrates.

The Middle

The thesis of André Glucksmann is that the issue of dissent has always be insofar as it is part and parcel of men growing for complacency in the hope of better worlds. Recently, the illusion is called "happy globalization". It is still called "ecology", whose criticism of progress into blithely imposition of new dogmas.

Why are philosophers needed Because without philosophy, there is no freedom. For two reasons. The first is that without philosophy we are individually and collectively dedicated to illusion, sentenced to the powers without brake, or challenge. The second, almost opposite of the first, is that freedom can be the worst of things without philosophy: it is the door open to the absolute, individual or collective powers. The philosophy is needed to address freedom, keep in the middle of too much and too little, enjoy its necessary limits.

It will be understood that André Glucksmann, the philosopher, even near the power, is always remote, at the risk of the repudiation of. The philosopher, tirelessly, questions, asticote, frustrated, dispute, destabilizes all established or being established. The opposite of the unattractive. It is not to formulate programmes, developing new illusions. This is not a Communicator. His place is also essential that limited. The need is even more current that powers are more concentrated. He is one who can avoid that form these "bubbles", ideological, political or financial, cause so hard men. A necessary L'EMMERDEUR.

See also "the most beautiful story of freedom" by André Glucksmann Nicole Bacharan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, afterword by Vaclav Havel, on the threshold, 195 pages, 16 euros.