The College Philosophique is best described as an island preserved from every
sort of conformity, an enclave at once removed from a nascent political tyranny
and liberated from the cowardice of a sleepy philosophical tradition.
Intellectual experimentation could be pursued without compromise, without
inhibitions, and at times recklessly, answering only to itself.
The general climate of the institute was marked by universal openness and a
curiosity that knew no bounds. No topic, nothing, however trivial or subaltern
it might appear, fell outside philosophy's field of investigation. There were
no more privileged or isolated areas of thought; a priori philosophical truths
were put aside: dhe search for meaning was followed wherever it led.
Fundamental information was not immediately winnowed from the insignificant:
traditional distinctions were called into question. Suspending its former
criteria, philosophy compromised itself, debased itself, visited areas
of existence it had never before acknowledged: thought was allowed to wander in
quotidian domains previously regarded as unworthy of its curiosity. The
philosopher felt liberated: he was no longer that serious man, imprisoned by a
rigid conception of what is and is not important, condemned to a life sentence
of the great questions. He was reconciled with daily life, and all subjects
drew his attention, especially those he had not previously been able to
investigate without tumbling from his pedestal.
How can we explain this sudden bulimia? By the almost simultaneous discovery of
Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. After them, there was no way philosophy could
blithely respond to the question "What am I?" with the Cartesian response "I am
a thinking being." Human reality could no longer be defined exclusively as
reason or understanding, but by two fundamental plots: the encounter with the
other and the relation to being. Plots, and not knowledge, for knowledge offers
no special access to being or to others. Such access is offered, on the
contrary, by phenomena that precede reflection, impalpable discomforts, states
of being long held to be blind or merely derivative, symptoms of something
else. Immense upheaval: the split between "subjective" and "objective"--between
the world as we perceive it, and what is only a manifestation of
ourselves--became hazy. Ultimate questions were now rooted in run-of-the-mill experience, and facts believed to be of purely psychic significance displayed
their revelatory power. Anxiety, for instance, was no longer a character trait
or a momentary lapse into the irrational, but a direct and irreducible route to
nothingness.
While Freudianism extended the psychological method to all of human experience,
phenomenology (since that is the name of this method) revealed, in contrary
fashion, the metaphysical drama played out in the banalities of life. Plebeian
concerns thus opened up to reveal aristocratic problems of thought. As Levinas
put it in his introduction to Time and the Other, a collection of
lectures delivered at the College Philosophique, "The words designating what
people were always concerned with, without daring to imagine it in a
speculative discourse, took the rank of categories."
At the time, the work of Emmanuel Levinas was known and appreciated by only a
group of specialists: his words were heard at the College Philosophique but
found little echo in the great postwar debates. It would take more than thirty
years for this subtle and demanding philosopher to find an audience beyond
philosophic technicians, and for his work to finally resonate in intellectual
life. The intellectual world, whether sure of the course history would take or
immersed in revolutionary urgency--when it was not ignoring the existence of
Levinas's thought entirely--had long considered such meditations as
outmoded, lacking contemporary, significance or concern for our
fellow men. Marxism's decline has eliminated this obstacle: today Levinas is
being discovered and appreciated not only for the gravity of his ethical
concern but even more for the unexpected charm with which his novelistic themes
have enlivened the austere discourse of philosophy.
What is existence? Levinas responds to this majestic question with an
inconsequential drama, the very drama whose affliction Oblomov must bear.
Oblomov, that famous character of Russian literature, suffers from a common
malady-- laziness--that he carries to the radical extreme of wholesale
revulsion toward any kind of activity whatsoever. He aspires to absolute
tranquility, and he can never quite reach his ideal. Even his slothful life as
a landlord, living off the income of his lands, is far too consuming. He has to
supervise the management of his domain, visit his tenants--in a word, live. But
his monumental laziness militates against any such concessions. So he shuts
himself in, flees from animation into apathy, even refuses to allow the light
of day to penetrate the four walls of his room. No such luck! There is always
too much going on for Oblomov, too much commotion and hubbub in his inaction.
Even if he were to stop opening his mail, delegate the work of administering
his property to others, chase off the last seekers of favor, spend his life in
bed, break every connection with the outside world once and for all in order to
slip into absolute indolence, undisturbed torpor--this work, this weight, this
duty, this inescapable undertaking would still remain Oblomov's: existence.
There is no such thing as going on strike against being. Oblomov hurdles these
obstacles to his repose only to hurl himself against this insurmountable
stumbling block. His lazy sighs are to no avail.
To exist, as Levinas tells us in his lectures at the College Philosophique, is
a burden and not a gift. The self is bound to itself, constantly encumbered
with and mired in itself. Existence imposes its terms with all the force of a
contract etched in stone. One is not: one is oneself. The phrase echoes
Sartre's formulation in The Age of Reason: "to exist is just that, to
imbibe oneself without being thirsty."
Such is the obligation that inspires Oblomov's "impotent and joyless aversion."
His laziness stands as an a priori protest against the burden of existence.
Behind the "I must do this" overwhelming him each morning with its tiresome
demands, Oblomov discovers an "I must be" that is all the more inexorable and
discouraging. For this slothful figure is not the possessor of a tragic flaw,
nor the victim of a past trauma, nor the representative of a class beset by
impotence, but a being who unsuccessfully refuses the condition of being. More
than a symbol of society or sign of neurosis, his lethargy is an ontological
state. In flight from every kind of intrigue, unsuited for grand tragedies,
Oblomov bears witness to this fundamental tragedy: in fatigue or atony, we
recoil in the face of existence, dragging our feet, wishing we could call time-out,
but escape is impossible: man is stuck with being.
Excerpted from: Finkielkraut, Alain, The Wisdom of Love, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1997, 0-8032-1991-1