BUCHOUL SAMUEL MPH 612 ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES MEERA BAINDUR FOR WEEK 10: MAR.

10-16

MCPH 2013-2014 WORD COUNT: 828

ASSIGNMENT 8 Deaf Dialogue

The shadow of Richard Dawkins recalls of a world one could have believed was irrevocably behind us. But his specter, that specter, becomes a full presence when one discovers the celebrity of the character, even simply online: nearly one million followers (followers!) on Twitter, and about 400 000 fans on Facebook. His eponymous foundation, subtitled Innovating for a Secular World, showcases a logo where the i of Foundation becomes a candle shedding light over a big black box. Reminiscence of the imaginary of the Enlightenment century, or perhaps an auto-da-f revenge over centuries of socalled obscurantism? The rhetoric seems ridiculously expectable and impotent, yet the sheer celebrity of the persona accounts for the (evolutionary) growth of his views. Richard Dawkins may be a funny character, but he is definitely a part of our world. The Enlightenment century, indeed the undeniable ancestor of most of the western and non-western traditions till date. A shift occurred in the 19th century what Foucault called the modern episteme with a relativization of the universalist and eternal claims of the Lumires towards a strong historical contextualization. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, critic of Hegel, himself critic of Kant. Then, the obsession would not anymore be that of light vis--vis darkness, but rather, of whose light one would be dealing with. Nietzsche shot a heavy blow at the objective scientific project of the Enlightenment: one would not follow the lights so blindly More than a precursor or a social leader to say the least! Nietzsche echoed through his neurotic prose the sprouting verve of skepticism the populations of his industrial times were experiencing. It would never be the same again: the scientific dreams of the Enlightenment would soon appear as an old cosmetic promise. The humanities, in the so-called Continental tradition, would thereafter resist the optimistic and good-willed tone of their predecessors to bring in a set of reflections marked by guilt, self-criticism and doubt. In Germany and France, this would not necessarily, or even rarely, lead to a wave of rash atheism: religion, like science, turned into an old myth, but living in a disenchanted world would be easy for no one. But somewhere a shift occurred. Without even mentioning the Analytic part of the story, it so happened that as late as hundred years after Nietzsche, an English author, a scientist turned 1

blockbuster writer, could write not only severe accounts of atheist doctrine, but also re-readings of evolution theory to assert the place of genes as the cardinal determining forces for life human and otherwise. In fact, the human and the animal would not mark any significative distinction in this perspective. What is fascinating in this question is not how Dawkins seems lost in an antique cause, but how so many of us academics, social science and humanities thinkers trained in the cultural approach of the continental tradition share this very criticism so strongly about Dawkins. How is it that we sing in a single voice the same string of rejection whenever the Englishman submits any hypothesis on the world, existence, life or the human? After Hegel, and especially after Nietzsche, philosophy and the humanities in France and Germany took a turn from the road followed by their English and American colleagues. The cries of despair before Dawkins The Selfish Gene reveal, before anything else, the impossibility for French and German-influenced philosophy, to consider human life as void of free-will and subjected to full-fledged determinism. Phenomenology and existentialism, now out of date, have nonetheless left their mark. And on the political side, Marxism and its offspring have made of the subject a political subject who can of course! have its word in the history of the world. Here, Dawkins and the Germano-French hardly speak the same language, and it is questionable whether each side read the other properly. It is a deaf dialogue, as the French idiom says, like a heated fight where no one can even process the others arguments. But two points could be mentioned to bring the debate forward. First, as idiotic as hardwire determinism may sound, continental philosophy has not submitted a convincing account of the very mechanism of life, except an always more fuzzy Vitalism. At the same time, it also prolonged an account of life necessarily anthropocentric, where plants and animals are understood in humans terms. But second, the continental response to Dawkins and other science determinists, could be a recourse to art. If the latter only see continental thought as fluffy literary non-sense, it is not at such levels that any point can be brought forth. But if art is brought in the discussion, the implications can be more powerful. What would be the genetic justification of the activity of art? And, more deeply, how could genes account for the variation of artistic creations from one individual to the next? While university professors can be forgotten as non-sense ideators, hardly can one deny the existence and importance of the arts. And it must be accounted for.