The Elegance of the Hedgehog (5 page)

The strong ones
Among humans
Do nothing
They talk
And talk again

I
t’s one of my profound thoughts, but it came from another profound thought. It was one of Papa’s guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach teach the teachers; and those who can’t teach the teachers go into politics.” Everyone seemed to find this very inspiring but for the wrong reasons. “That’s so true,” said Colombe, who is an expert at fake self-criticism. She’s one of those who think that knowledge is power and forgiveness: If I know that I belong to a self-satisfied elite who are sacrificing the common good through an excess of arrogance, this liberates me from criticism, and I come out with twice the prestige. Papa also tends to think like this, although he’s less of an idiot than my sister. He still believes that something known as duty exists and although in my opinion that’s just pure fancy, it protects him from the cynic’s debility. Let me explain: nobody is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics can not relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the word has meaning and, when things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude. “Life’s a whore, I don’t believe in anything anymore and I’ll wallow in that idea until it makes me sick” is the very credo of the innocent who hasn’t been able to get his way. That’s my sister all cut out. She may be a student at the École Normale, but she still believes in Santa Claus, not because she has a good heart but because she is totally childish. She started giggling like an idiot when Papa’s colleague came out with his fancy phrase, as if to say, “I’m an expert on the
mise en abyme
,” and that confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a long time: Colombe is a walking disaster.

As for me, I think that his sentence is a bona fide profound thought, precisely because it isn’t true, or at least not entirely true. It doesn’t mean what you think it does at the outset. If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that’s not even the problem. What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

A
fter one month of frenetic reading I come to the conclusion, with immense relief, that phenomenology is a fraud. In the same way that cathedrals have always aroused in me the sensation of extreme light-headedness one often feels in the presence of man-made tributes to the glory of something that does not exist, phenomenology has tested to the extreme my ability to believe that so much intelligence could have gone to serve so futile an undertaking. As this is already the month of November, there are no cherry plums available. At times like this therefore—eleven months a year in actual fact—I have to make do with dark chocolate (70%). But I know in advance the outcome of the test. Had I but the leisure to bite into the standard meter, I would slap myself noisily on the thighs while reading, and such delightful chapters as “Uncovering the final sense of science by becoming immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon” or “The problems constituting the transcendental ego” might even cause me to die of laughter, a blow straight to the heart as I sit slumped in my plush armchair, with plum juice or thin driblets of chocolate oozing from the corners of my mouth . . .

When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world?

Let’s start with the first question.

For millennia now, by way of “know thyself” to “I think therefore I am,” mankind has been rambling on about the ridiculous human prerogative that is our consciousness of our own existence and above all the ability of this consciousness to make itself its own object. When something itches, a man scratches and is aware that he is scratching. If you ask him, What are you doing? he’ll reply: I’m scratching myself. If you push your questioning a bit further (are you aware that you are conscious of the fact that you are scratching yourself?) he will again reply, Yes; thus, ad infinitum to as many are-you-aware-and-conscious questions as you wish. Does this, however, leave man with any less of an itch to know that he is scratching and is aware of it? Can reflective consciousness have a beneficial influence on the order of the itching? Nay, not in the slightest. Knowing that it itches and being conscious of the fact that one is conscious of knowing it has absolutely no effect on the fact of the itching. As an added handicap one must endure the lucidity that results from this wretched condition, and I would wager ten pounds of cherry plums that such lucidity merely serves to exacerbate an unpleasant condition which my cat, for example, can eliminate with a quick flick or two of his rear paw. But it seems so extraordinary to us—no other animal is capable of this and in this way we escape our own animal nature—that as human beings we are able to know that we are in the process of scratching ourselves; this preeminence of human consciousness seems to many to be the manifestation of something divine that is able to escape the cold determinism in us to which all physical things are subject.

All of phenomenology is founded on this certainty: our reflective consciousness, the sign of our ontological dignity, is the only entity we have that is worth studying, for it saves us from biological determinism.

No one seems aware of the fact that, since
we are
animals subject to the cold determinism of physical things, all of the foregoing is null and void.

W
hich brings us to the second question: what do we know of the world?

Idealists like Kant have an answer to this question.

What do they answer?

They answer: not a great deal.

Transcendental idealism holds that we can know only that which appears to our consciousness, that semi-divine entity that rescues us from our animal self. What we know of the world is what our consciousness can say about it because of what it has perceived—and nothing else.

Let us take an example, at random: a sweet cat by the name of Leo. Why? Because I find it easier with a cat. And let me ask you: how can you be certain that it really is a cat and, likewise, how can you even know what a cat is? A healthy reply would consist in emphasizing the fact that your perception of the animal, complemented by a few conceptual and linguistic mechanisms, has enabled you to constitute your knowledge. But the response of the transcendental idealist would be to illustrate how impossible it is to know whether what we perceive and conceive of as a cat—if that which appears to our consciousness as a cat—is actually true to what the cat is in its deepest being. It may well be that my cat—at present I perceive him as an obese quadruped with quivering whiskers and I have filed him away in my mind in a drawer labeled “cat”—is in actual fact, and in his very essence, a blob of green sticky stuff that does not meow. My senses, however, have been fashioned in such a way that this is not apparent to me, and the revolting blob of green sticky stuff, deceiving both my disgust and my earnest trust, is masquerading before my consciousness beneath the appearance of a silky and gluttonous house pet.

So much for Kantian idealism. What we know of the world is only the
idea
that our consciousness forms of it. But there is an even more depressing theory than that one, a theory that offers a prospect even more terrifying than that of innocently caressing a lump of green drool or dropping our toast every morning into a pustular abyss we had mistaken for a toaster.

There is the idealism of Edmund Husserl, which as far as I’m concerned now signifies designer-label homespun cowls for wayward monks sidetracked by some obscure schism in the Baptist church.

According to Husserl’s theory, all that exists is the perception of the cat. And the cat itself? Well, we can just do without it. Bye-bye kitty. Who needs a cat? What cat? Henceforth, philosophy will claim the right to wallow exclusively in the wickedness of pure mind. The world is an inaccessible reality and any effort to try to know it is futile. What do we know of the world? Nothing. As all knowledge is merely reflective consciousness exploring its own self, the world, therefore, can merrily go to the devil.

This is phenomenology: the “science of that which appears to our consciousness.” How does a phenomenologist spend his day? He gets up, fully conscious as he takes his shower that he is merely soaping a body whose existence has no foundation, then he wolfs down a few slices of toast and jam that have been nihilized, slips on some clothes that are the equivalent of an empty set of parentheses, heads for his office, and then snatches up a cat.

It matters little to our phenomenologist whether the cat exists or does not exist or even what the cat is in its very essence. The indemonstrable does not interest him. What cannot be denied, however, is that a cat appeared to his consciousness, and it is this act of appearing that is of concern to our good fellow.

And what is more, an act of appearing that is quite complex. The fact that one can explain, in detail, the way in which one’s consciousness perceives a thing whose very existence is a matter of indifference is simply extraordinary. Did you know that our consciousness does not perceive things right off the bat but performs a complicated series of operations of synthesis which, by means of successive profiling, introduce to our senses objects as diverse as, for example, a cat, a broom, or a flyswatter—and, God knows, isn’t that useful? Have you ever wondered why it is that you can observe your cat and know at the same time what he looks like from the front, behind, above and below—even though at the present moment you are perceiving him only from the front? It must be that your consciousness, without your even realizing it, has been synthesizing multiple perceptions of your cat from every possible angle, and has ended up creating this integral image of the cat that your sight, at that moment, could never give you. And the same is true for the flyswatter, which you will only ever perceive from one direction even though you can visualize it in its entirety in your mind and, oh miracle, you know perfectly well without even turning it over how it is made on the other side.

You will agree that such knowledge is quite useful. We can’t imagine Manuela using a flyswatter without immediately rallying the knowledge that she has of the various stages of profiling necessary to her perception. Moreover, you can’t imagine Manuela using a flyswatter for the simple reason that there are never any flies in rich people’s apartments. Neither flies, nor pox, nor bad smells, nor family secrets. In rich people’s apartments everything is clean, smooth, healthy and consequently safe from the tyranny of flyswatters and public opprobrium.

But enough of phenomenology: it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hard-core autism that no real cat would ever importune.

W
hat are you reading?” asks Manuela, who has just arrived breathless from her Lady de Broglie’s, feeling consumptive after preparing the evening’s dinner party. She had just accepted delivery of seven jars of Petrossian caviar and was breathing like Darth Vader.

“An anthology of folk poems,” I say, closing the Husserl chapter forever.

Manuela is in a good mood today, that I can see. She eagerly unpacks a little hamper filled with almond sponge fingers that are still set in the frilly white paper in which they were baked, then sits down and smoothes the tablecloth carefully with the flat of her hand, the prelude to a statement that will send her into transports of delight.

I set out the cups, join her at the table, and wait.

“Madame de Broglie is not pleased with her truffles,” she begins.

“Oh, really?” I ask politely.

“They do not smell,” continues Manuela crossly, as if she holds this shortcoming to be an enormous personal affront.

We indulge in this information for all it is worth, and I savor the vision of Bernadette de Broglie in her kitchen, looking haggard and disheveled and doing her utmost to spray a potion of cèpe and chanterelle juice onto the offending roots in the ridiculous, insane hope that they might condescend to give off some faint odor evocative of the forest.

“And Neptune peed on Mr. Saint-Nice’s leg,” continues Manuela. “The poor beast must have been holding it in for hours, and when Mr. Badoise finally got out the leash the dog couldn’t wait and in the entrance he went on Saint-Nice’s trouser leg.”

Neptune, a cocker spaniel, belongs to the owners of the third-floor right-hand-side apartment. The second and third floors are the only ones divided into two apartments (of two thousand square feet each). On the first floor you have the de Broglies, on the fourth the Arthens, on the fifth the Josses and on the sixth the Pallières. On the second floor are the Meurisses and the Rosens. On the third, the Saint-Nices and the Badoises. Neptune belongs to the Badoises, or more precisely, to Mademoiselle Badoise, who is studying for her law degree in Assas, and who organizes soirées with other cocker spaniel owners studying for law degrees in Assas.

I am very fond of Neptune. Yes, we appreciate each other a great deal, no doubt because of that state of grace that is attained when one’s feelings are immediately accessible to another creature’s. Neptune can sense that I love him; his multiple desires are perfectly clear to me. What charms me about the whole business is that he stubbornly insists on remaining a dog, whereas his mistress would like to make a gentleman of him. When he goes out into the courtyard, he runs to the very very end of his leash and stares covetously at the puddles of muddy water idling before him. His mistress has only to give one jerk to his yoke for him to lower his hindquarters down onto the ground, and with no further ado he will set to licking his attributes. The sight of Athena, the Meurisses’ ridiculous whippet, causes Neptune to stick his tongue out like a lubricious satyr and pant in anticipation, his head filled with phantasms. What is particularly amusing about cocker spaniels is their swaying gait when they are in a playful mood: it’s as if they had tiny little springs screwed to their paws that cause them to bounce upward—but gently, without jolting. This also affects their paws and ears like the rolling of a ship, so cocker spaniels, like jaunty little vessels plying dry land, lend a nautical touch to the urban landscape: utterly enchanting.

Ultimately, however, Neptune is a greedy glutton who’ll do anything for a scrap of turnip or a crust of stale bread. When his mistress leads him past the garbage can room, he pulls frenetically in the direction of said room, tongue lolling, tail wagging madly. Diane Badoise despairs of such behavior. To her distinguished soul it seems that one’s dog should be like the young ladies of antebellum high society in Savannah in the Confederate South, who could scarcely find a husband unless they feigned to have no appetite whatsoever.

But instead, Neptune carries on as if he were some famished Yankee.