Today, the supporters of the new radicalities, the very ones who challenge the knowledge established in the name of social justice, of the inequality which presided over their genesis and of that which they help to maintain, present themselves as the correct interpreters of the fundamental law of our political system.
There is in the critical discourse that they deploy a pretension to the truth: that of possessing the true interpretation of the requirements of justice, to the exclusion of any other conception of this same ideal. It is such a conviction which justifies in the eyes of the actors of the ” cancel culture »Their right to decree which works should be excluded from public space and which lecturers should be banned from staying in our educational institutions. Such assurance, however, should astonish even those who have established that there is no reason, at least no reason which can claim objectivity. Because who can commit to defending a cause without considering that it is just and true for himself and for others?
Ideas in reviews
We must then ask ourselves what can be the source of the fervor shown by the most radical actors of these protest movements in the context of such suspicion with regard to any truth. For the most resolute, there is only a singular reason, only a particular science, and no truth except for the subject who enunciates it. This is why many have come to question the “neutrality” of a reason that they now qualify as “paternalistic”. They find themselves in a position, if not uncertain, since they remain firmly convinced of the veracity of their commitment, at the very least intellectually untenable. These activists of gender, race and sex bring to the world a moral truth of which they are prohibited from asserting the full universality.
Where does the extraordinary power of conviction shown by these critical discourses come from if they cannot rely on the knowledge they are fighting and whose universality they challenge; knowledge, let us recall it to close the loop, which in their eyes are only the instruments of the powerful and the expression of a criminal history carried over to our universities?
Paradoxically, these new radicalities, whatever the idealism that inspires them, have a part of nihilism. This nihilism that I will allow myself to qualify as ” woke To arouse debate is an American creation, which is why it retains the characteristics of this particular society, starting with the moral apathy of the majority denounced by James Baldwin and the militant fury aroused by the memory of the crimes committed since origin until today towards minorities. To fully grasp the content of this American-style nihilism, however, it is necessary to deepen the nature of this intellectual phenomenon.
Nihilism denies civilization, it is even its only reason for existence; but such a negation can take different forms in history. In Europe, in the XIXe and XXe centuries, it was a question of denying civilization in its first truth; a truth that requires a delicate balance between science and morality. Nihilism woke does not deny the “moral truth” that our democratic civilization entails, quite the contrary; it aims to establish its full authority, but through a commitment to social justice which is accomplished against science, reason, and even “Truth”.
This particular type of nihilism, born of the tensions inherent in liberal societies, breaks the balance between science and morality, that is to say, in this case, justice understood as the expression of a moral truth. . Nihilism woke is less radical than its European predecessor, but it nonetheless leads to strange intellectual paradoxes which perplex us today. One of the most puzzling expressions of this figure of nihilism lies in the rejection of the universality of science advocated by the moderns, but also in the negation, in the name of justice, of the truths brought to the world by humanist culture. ancient writers and philosophers of the West.
We can hope, at the end of the debates that are taking place on questions of race, gender and sex, that we can re-establish among us a balance that has been established in recent decades and recognize the rights of science against of certain interpretations of moral truth, a truth that, moreover, we share. Maybe then we can read it again Metamorphoses of Ovid and discover there something other than the violence described by the poet. Such an exit from the complications resulting from the authority acquired by the supporters of nihilism woke in the public space would make it possible to consider a figure of justice reconciled with the truth of science.
Such a reconciliation seems nevertheless very uncertain, because the requirement of coherence which is imposed on all seems to me compromised in the eyes of our contemporaries, so much the sufferings of some and the contempt of the others weigh heavily on the conscience.
Comments or suggestions for Des Idées en reviews? Write to [email protected].