Once a month, The duty challenges philosophy enthusiasts to decipher a current issue based on the theses of a notable thinker.
The Middle East is once again on fire, but the international community once again seems incapable of initiating the slightest intercultural dialogue, consequently revealing its nullity in the art of disarmament. Here, in Quebec, we no longer know whether to emphasize our chance to be far from the conflicts that endanger the world or to tremble with fear at the prospect of losing all hope in human beings. Especially since our society is not free from slippages and disagreements. We experienced the October crisis in 1970, the Oka crisis in 1990 and the debate surrounding the national question continues to resurface in the public arena. In the past, Trudeau Sr. and Hubert Aquin crossed swords; In the past, René-Daniel Dubois and Andrée Ferretti did the same. Just yesterday, Charles Taylor and Fernand Dumont couldn’t even communicate, or Gérard Bouchard and Serge Cantin to get along. More recently, Pierre Nepveu and Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard added more.
For Pierre Nepveu, winner of the Governor General’s Awards for poetry and essays, we must learn the lesson of literature: everyone will one day experience a change of scenery. With this argument in mind, in an interview given to Duty, the eminent professor of literature is categorical: “The nation, for me, today, cannot be a pure transcendence. The expression “unitary nation” that we find among certain essayists prevents us from thinking about Quebec reality as it is” (The dutyApril 30, 2022).
Two weeks later, in the pages of the same newspaper, as if in reply to Pierre Nepveu (but without naming him), Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, a young essayist, wrote: “ […] we must dare to express the Quebec difference, highlighting what makes this small French-speaking nation unique in North America. » As an argument, he invoked history: “ […] our collective adventure draws its roots above all from New France, while being enriched with multiple contributions over time” (The dutyMay 18, 2022).
This debate on the present and future of nations is not trivial or specific to Quebec, it is rather part of the larger international context. To get there, I suggest we draw inspiration from the reflections led by the late Fernand Dumont and one of his main successors, the philosopher Serge Cantin.
An experience common to nations: entry into modernity
To participate in intercultural dialogue, we must undoubtedly pay joint attention to an experience that concerns us all: entry into modernity. Indeed, for any community, whatever it may be, modernity disrupts the way of life.
The modern challenge is not only economic or technical, it is anthropological and philosophical. How can we encourage the emergence of a human subject responsible for his or her life while preserving, and this is the element too often forgotten, the cultural relay essential to the humanization of its members? Through language, our ancestors charted the one-way ticket to humanization, but modern progress subsequently led to the loss of the first “community of destiny”.
Indeed, modern life provokes a push towards individualization, at the risk of “uprooting”, which constitutes “perhaps the most decisive issue of the modern period”, as Serge Cantin rightly recalls. in his work Distance and memory. Essay on interpretation of the work of Fernand Dumont (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2019, p. 37).
There is a risk of uprooting, because there is a double misunderstanding of the meaning of culture. On the one hand, by merging culture and tradition, some give in to “this illusory belief in an intangible, sacred permanence of the social order” (Distance and memory…, p. 109). On the other hand, faced with the weight of the past, others end up believing that they will be able to modify themselves as they wish, thus giving in to a new mirage: “an illusion of freedom”, as if humans could live outside of culture or society (Distance and memory…, p. 247).
In both cases, the patient work of cultural mediation remains unthought: obscured by the immutable order in pre-modern society, reduced to the useful freedom of the consumer in modern society. What does that mean? Have the questions of philosophical anthropology become political categories?
Let’s be clear. In modern walking, there are four elements to consider. First, withdrawal into oneself, typical of survival, seems to be the most common way of resisting disappearance. Secondly, we must admit that this withdrawal prevents entry into modernity. Thirdly, we must therefore happily cross the threshold of modernity, but while avoiding the fourth and final element, uprooting, which would be all the more devastating when imposed by globalized capitalism.
The essential mediation: a culture of convergence
How to achieve this? The question applies to all cultures. Because any society that does not achieve political sharing, the necessary sharing of a judgment of truth about its own living conditions, condemns its population to anomie (drugs and tranquilizers) or to an explosion of violence (“this “It’s not me, it’s the other person who started it”).
There is a concept in Fernand Dumont that could help us enter the democracy of the modern world: the “culture of convergence”. The Quebec thinker explained this clearly in his work Common reasons : “In every country in the world, including the United States, there is a mediating culture and language. The question is to know what those of Quebec would be. This is not a nationalist prejudice; it is a fundamental question which concerns the health of life together in a society” (Dumont, Common reasons, Boréal, 1995, p. 129).
For Dumont, the common thread of this culture of convergence was not French-Canadian identity, but “French culture.” Serge Cantin will return to this with determination, rejecting Gérard Bouchard’s erroneous interpretation: Fernand Dumont did not write “French Canadian culture”, he only wrote “French culture” (Cantin, Sovereignty in an impasse, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2014, p. 193-194).
Such a culture of convergence, consolidated by the sharing of judgment, could become the horizon of all Quebecers, natives or immigrants, believers or atheists, or however we wish to define ourselves.
But, speaking particularly to the natives, the philosopher Serge Cantin calls for mourning, “the mourning of French-Canadian identity” (Sovereignty in an impasse, p. 62). Because it is indeed a matter of mourning, that is to say a time of deep reflection in order to consent to the loss and thus achieve appeasement, generally obtained by retaining a positive memory of a previous life forever lost. Understand: the loss of the famous “community of destiny” which served, during the long period of survival, as the only path towards humanization.
In this regard, Fernand Dumont and Serge Cantin are perfectly right to envisage the future by betting on a new cultural mediation, because every culture has the resources to lead each of its members on the path to becoming human.
But there you go, our world is not going well. In the absence of true convergence, intercultural dialogue, within and between nations, will stumble at the slightest obstacle. We must still maintain the hope that we will one day manage to chart with greater clarity the path to our humanization and entry into modernity. Will we then manage to cross the threshold by accepting to be only passing through?
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