Insouciance

 ~by David Aiken~

 

There are any number of connotations and denotations for the word ‘insouciance’. In a gentler summertime of the world, the word meant to be without ‘souci’, to have no cares, like Calvin and Hobbes at the beginning of summer vacation.

Insouciance is a fine sounding word, because it harks back to French origins. But in this world become modern its meaning is generally to be found on the negative side of the connotation tally. Per the folks in the wiki-world, insouciance means any and all of a variety of things: carefreeness, carefree attitude, carelessness, recklessness, aloofness, apathy, callousness, disdain, disinterest, dispassion, disregard, heedlessness, immunity, impassiveness, inattention, inertia, insensitivity, lethargy, listlessness, negligence, neutrality, nonchalance, noninterference, torpor, unconcern, unimportance, unmindfulness, inconsequentiality, insignificancy, inattention.

 

With all this in mind, an insouciant attitude seems an odd response for folks to have in the face of a worldwide pandemic. Refusal to wear masks, as if the wearing of masks to protect the health of those more vulnerable who surround us, were somehow a violation of one’s own personal liberties. Refusal to keep a discrete distance from others, as if, all of the sudden, absolute physical proximate between humans were the most important virtue, and legal right, of the body life of the human animal. Strange times, these COVID days.

Rackham_Poe's Mask of the Red Death

“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.” The otherworldly protagonist of Edgar Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, is even right now, yet once again, mowing down human fields, in living colors instead of stylistic flourishes from a poet’s hand, as it wends its way along the world’s highways and byways, boulevards and alleys. Familiarity rings out in every word of this tale, first published by the American poet in 1842….

“But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends […], and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. […] They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. […] The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure…

 

In the meantime, it was folly …  to think.

The insouciant life belongs to the passive mind, to the mind that believes it is folly to think; to the mind that has taught itself, or at least has learned, to receive passively stimuli from the world. Of course, this passivity is not to be confused with any form of philosophical Stoicism, which is an active discipline of the mind and emotions. Rather, in this passive variation of the insouciant mind, the confines of World correspond to the edges of the human body (physis). The passive existence, presence ?, of such minds as this can never be truly appraised by any measure other than their simple physical presence in a Darwinian frame of reference; because their life has been simply conceived, and interpreted, as ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And nothing remains once the dust has settled.

The philosophical life, on the other hand, belongs to the active mind, which may also have been school-educated, as well, and therefore has also learned passively as a young twig—the educational institution qua social factory oblige. But the active mind eventually transcends mere receptivity, actively remodeling what has been passively received in order to create a personal interior décor for itself, to discover its own voice of authenticity in this plastic external environment we call World. This is an original meaning for the Greek concept of kosmos. And ultimately, the one who strives for this life of mental activity will appraise himself according to the cosmic “projects” that he creates and constructs over the course of a life. Which means that at the end of that creative life, when the body has ceased to be anything but ashes and dust, what yet remains in the world will be whatever fruit was grown and nurtured though the various projects of an existence of authentic and personal activity. This is life that is more than life. It is life as art.

 

Poe paints for us, unforgettably, in deep, sodden billows of scarlet hue, those who respond to the various dramatic situations that Life showers upon us through a framework of hysterical insouciance. The descriptions of an equally thoughtless world, equally sans-souci, echo in present-day media depictions of a pandemic world:

“It’s like mass gaslighting,” says Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University. “We were put in a situation where better solutions were closed off but a lot of people had that fact sneak up on them. In the absence of a robust federal response, we’re all left washing our hands and hoping for the best, which makes us more susceptible to magical thinking and individual-level fixes.” And if those fixes never come, “I think people are going to harden into a fatalistic sense that we have to accept whatever the risks are to continue with our everyday lives.”

 

Mask of Red Death_1919

The current thinking about COVID-19, world-wide, puts the Crude Mortality Ratio (CMR) at 2-3% after only 8 months of spreading infection, which, for total number of deaths, puts this pandemic on a par with the Spanish Flu of 1918, which had a CMR of 2.7%. But that disaster wreaked havoc for about two years by most estimates, from 1917 to 1918; and guesses concerning the world population at that time suggest that the total number of global dead was approximately 50 million human lives. So, our young COVID-19 has another 17 months to play catch-up in the global numbers game.

The magical minds are moved by the desire to avoid the world, to banish it from their society; by the will not to know. By the hysterical drive to forget.

 

In his (very) short 1883-84 introduction to Au soleil, 19^th century author Guy de Maupassant describes a primally disheartened, existential state of mind in the face of World, which is perhaps the phenomenological equivalent of the mental and emotional world-weariness that the Germans refer to as Lebensmüde:

Quand on est las, las à pleurer du matin au soir, las à ne plus avoir la force de se lever pour boire un verre d’eau, las des visages amis vus trop souvent et devenus irritants, des odieux et placides voisins, des choses familières et monotones, de sa maison, de sa rue, […] las de son chien trop fidèle, des taches immuables des tentures, de la régularité des repas, du sommeil dans le même lit, de chaque action répétée chaque jour, las de soi-même, de sa propre voix, des choses qu’on répète sans cesse, du cercle étroit de ses idées, las de sa figure vue dans la glace…

 

The passive mind is tracked through its own mental darkness by a relentless terror of everything that is World. Or at the very least, such are the powerful emotional descriptions that are evoked, and flood through us, when we read our various lebensmüde authors.

 

Happily, however, activities like Philosophy can hold out the promise of a fuller and richer life, a life of the active mind, a contemplative attitude toward World that enlightens and instructs us on our journey through the darker corners of World. A philosopher of this sort of activity is Epictetus who, in the face of the mystery that is Life, invites us to be guided always by a calm philosophical thoughtfulness as we journey through the highways and byways of the world that is our world.

 

§ 2 “Ench”, 1.11.1.1

    TRANSLATION (AIKEN)—You ought never say about anything: “I lost this”; (2) but rather: “I returned this thing.” Has the child died? It is returned. Has the wife died? She has been returned. Have your home and property been taken from you? Well, are these not returned as well? “But,” you might say, (5) “the person who took them away is bad!” And yet what difference does it make to you how you lost these things? Or by which means the Giver takes these things away? (6) [Your ‘use’ of things extends] only for as long as the Giver bestows—so, engage with every ‘thing’ as though it belongs to someone else, (7) in the way that travelers do their hotel accommodations.

 

References and Further Readings:

·      https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/pandemic-intuition-nightmare-spiral-winter/616204/

 

New Epictetus Translations in Phrontisterion:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/p/epictetus-handbooklinks.html

 

 

Liberal Arts at University College Roosevelt_RIP

~by David Aiken~

On April 26, 2019 University College Roosevelt took managerial steps to sever all recognizable ties with the educational tradition of classical Liberal Arts. While the title of ‘Liberal Arts’ will be formally retained in institutional documentation, the undergraduate Liberal Arts vision at UCR has now been completely excised. UCR is now on its way, quite officially, to becoming a venue for Engineering, Science and Technology.

This change was already clearly announced in the Strategic Plan of 2017-2021.

The key element of this strategical shift has been to remove classical Liberal Arts classes as requirements, a shift that guarantees the attrition of student population for those classes.

Among the managerial steps taken yesterday were the following:

1) The Academic Core as a department was dissolved, and the remaining supported Core tracks are to be dispersed into either the departments of Arts & Humanities or the Social Sciences.

2) AC Foreign Language teaching faculty were either given notice of termination yesterday, or given the possibility of being retained on reduced and temporary contracts to allow the institution to get students presently in the language pipeline to the end of their course.

3) The UCR philosophy program is Humanities based, which is to say broadly conceived, and this is consistent with a Liberal Arts institutional model. The UCR philosophy instructor was informed yesterday, publicly, that he will not be offered the possibility to teach after retirement, but that he will be replaced by the current dean, a Social Sciences political philosopher.

4) Several other faculty teaching positions from Social Sciences, those which also have senior faculty with upcoming retirements, will not be staffed or replaced at their retirement.

The motivation for this shift away from classical liberal arts is, as always, money.

Liberal Arts is a challenging sale in the Netherlands. The crossroads-moment for UCR has now come and gone. The institution could have committed here to a Liberal Arts philosophy fully, thereby creating a distinctive market niche in the Netherlands. This would have meant creating or re-creating, and placing emphasis on, classical Liberal Arts programs such as Theatre and Media, Film, Foreign Languages and Literatures, and other Humanities-type subjects.

Instead of this, UCR has chosen for an Engineering, Science and Technology orientation, thereby aligning itself with the more normative social science philosophy of other Dutch institutions of higher learning.

Let it be clearly said, though, that this shift is not truly motivated by money. Money is a red herring in this game. Rather, this shift has been brought about because of a philosophical incompatibility: the tradition of the Liberal Arts is an uneasy fit in a market and society dedicated to the sciences and social sciences. A Liberal Arts institution ceases to be Liberal Arts when the administrative Powers-That-Be, not zealously persuaded by the goodness of the classical Liberal Arts model, fail to aggressively ‘move their product’; but instead follow the money that countries and provinces throw at Engineering and Technology programs, and the more useful “sciences.”

So, UCR is dismissing teaching faculty in Spanish, French, German and Dutch, and perhaps in Academic Writing; and it is reducing senior faculty in Sociology, Anthropology, and Philosophy. Anywhere from 8-10 teachings colleagues are being shown the door.

The red herring dangled by UCR administration to justify this shift away from the Liberal Arts at UCR, is so the institution can increase its rainy-day savings. There is no urgency or financial crisis at UCR. This shift is simply about having a little extra pocket money—just in case. This was also clearly said in the Strategic Plan of 2017-2021:

“Over the past years, UCR as an organization has evolved towards a position of sound finances. (…) Our income consists of 60% state funding, 20% tuition fees and 20% from other revenues. Although the solvency rate has developed positively during the last eight years, the small-scale nature of UCR makes us vulnerable to financial setbacks. (…) A solvency rate (equity/total assets)*100%) of 30% is needed to secure a financially sound position (in 2017 the solvency rate is 11%).”

Martin Heidegger: Post-Mortem, Post-Philosophy

Martin Heidegger is Lady Philosophy’s problem child—there is no doubt about it.

Imagine Boethius, who was a Roman senator, a consul, and all-around good-guy Stoic philosopher at large, but who had then been, from the height of his successes, thrown into prison for conspiracy against the Ostrogoth King, Theodoric, and then executed in 524 AD. This good man, who seemingly had forgotten all the life-lessons that are taught by Stoicism and by Plato, had in prison a consoling series of conversations with Lady Philosophy; and she was able to guide Boethius back again onto the path of right thinking and therefore of right living and dying. Boethius has therefore been for centuries the quintessential example of the life lived philosophically.

Now imagine Heidegger in a bitch session with Lady Philosophy. First it would be H saying: ‘Get away from me, because I don’t believe that Reasoned Thinking (a.k.a., rationalism) can help us live,’ and then him explaining in the inexplicable jargon of mumbo-jumbo: ‘In my Nazi vision of life a man only has meaning as a cog in the wheels of the German state; but I am special because I am the Führer’s philosopher, so please leave me alone—you have nothing to teach me.’ Unlike Boethius, Heidegger was never plagued by ethical thinking, and he was uninterested in being a teacher of the philosophical life.

Phrontisterion readily understands philosophy that is conceived of as a vehicle to help us to negotiate with awareness and personal dignity the all-too-often surprising vicissitudes of life, which is why Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy has continued to remain at the top of philosophy’s all-time best-seller list. And very rightly so. However, what should be the take-home Kerygma of a conception of philosophy that is not truly interested in life at all, but only in the enslavement of the many?

The following is Phrontisterion’s translation of a book review by Yann Diener, which appeared in the French weekly journal, Charlie Hebdo (No. 1228 / 3 February 2016); Diener reviews several books about Martin Heidegger that have recently been or are about to be published in French.

“Books [by Yann Diener]: Heidegger: his Life, his Work, his Führer.

Star philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger would have preferred that his bibliographical notice be limited to the narrative of his promenades in the Black Forest with his students. That did not happen: the historian Guillaume Payen has published [Perrin: January 2016] a solid biography that tells the story of the Master’s passage from Catholicism to Nazism.

Very well documented, Payen’s book will not end up as fodder for peoples’ magazines; rather, it shall permit one to read or reread Heidegger in his context. Payen, as historian, is contributing to the contextualizing work that the philosopher Emmanuel Faye as well as the linguist Francois Rastier have so desperately wished for (Charlie Hebdo, 16 & 23 December 2015). This biography is important because it is the first that shows the logic of young Heidegger’s journey, going from Catholicism to Nazism: first he wants to become a priest, but then he is seized by the desire to toss everything out the window, and he will begin to focus first on philosophy and then on national-socialism. Heidegger’s adepts have wanted to portray him as an inadvertent or opportunistic Nazi; but now we discover that he had a veritable passion for Hitler. When, in June 1933, his colleague Karl Jaspers asks him how a man as uninformed as Hitler can govern Germany, Heidegger gives him this stupefying response: “His educational upbringing does not matter; just look at his marvelous hands.” The ‘back-to-Being’ philosopher is counting on the Führer to provide for Germany, and so also for the whole world, the conditions for a philosophical revolution. (In his Reichstag speech of January 1939, Hitler even portrays himself as a prophet). Catholic until the age of 25, Heidegger will remain Nazi until his death. Nevertheless, his apologists continue to maintain that their hero was nothing more than an unfortunate assimilation into the Nazis worldview. This is an example of a thesis contradicted by the biography. The only choice the adepts shall have will be either to go into full-blown denial or to shift from their position of negation to a position of affirmation in order to claim/explain their unconditional love of their prophet.

Hypnotic language.

Translator of Kafka, of Freud or of Peter Handke, George-Arthur Goldschmidt has already shown an interest in the particularity of Heidegger-speak: his violence is contained in his hypnotizing prosody, which quickly fascinates his students. He uses the omnipresent ‘We,’ which helps to constitute [psychologically] a combat group. The texts that George-Arthur Goldschmidt has dedicated to this terrifying ‘newspeak’ are reedited in a book scheduled for publication at the end of January 2016. [NT: It is as of yet unpublished]. There is no doubt that the publication of this book shall permit us to get a clearer picture of how Heidegger’s words have slipped into the vocabulary of philosophy and how, unfortunately, they have also wormed their way into the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Anne-Lise Stern, Auschwitz survivor and psychoanalyst, used to spit on the ground when she had to pronounce the name of Heidegger, whose concepts have helped psychoanalysis to slide toward a sort of adaptive psychotherapy, whose focus is to normalize and to format the subject.

            When Heidegger used to begin his lecture on Aristotle, he would summarize the biography of the Greek philosopher by saying: “He was born, he lived, he died.” For Heidegger, we can say: he was born a Catholic, he lived as a Nazi, he is a dead Nazi.

1.     Guillaume Payen, Martin Heidegger. Catholicisme, révolution, nazisme (Perrin), January 2016.

2.     George-Arthur Goldschmidt. Heidegger contre la langue allemande, to be published at CNRS publishers.”

Further reading:

• François Rastier, Naufrage d’un prophète. Heidegger aujourd’hui, PUF, 2015.
• Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie : Autour des séminaires inédits de 1933-1935, Le Livre de Poche, réed. 2007.
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.nl/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html
• http://www.worldcat.org/title/crisis-of-german-ideology-intellectual-origins-of-the-third-reich/oclc/253069
• http://next.liberation.fr/culture/2014/03/06/il-n-y-a-pas-d-affaire-heidegger_985029
• http://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/lessai-et-la-revue-du-jour-14-15/laffaire-heidegger-revue-critique
• https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/09/30/commentary-heideggers-black-notebooks
• http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/martin-heideggers-black-notebooks-reveal-the-depth-of-anti-semitism.html
• https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/what-heidegger-was-hiding
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html
• http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page_24.html

« Fanaticism »

“…non abbiamo potuto non vedere” (…we could not not see)—

Primo Levi (from The Drowned and the Saved)

Thomas Jefferson

« Fanaticism »

As we pivot into this new year, and just before we jump and shoot into our futures, it is only natural that we look backwards at the groundwork laid during the year that has, even just now, become our yesterday. This is an unqualified good. Because History shall one day write that the war of supremacy, or at the very least a significant conflict in that Total War, was formally launched, yet again, between Enlightenment philosophy and totalitarian Theocracy. The battle lines in this war of ideas began clearly and unquestionably to take shape in 2015 as they were dug in the sandy terrain of ideas and opinions, and the opening salvos were rude and bloody. That History to come will not allow us to say that we have not seen.

            In the debate that must come concerning the place and role of religion in the civil society of the 21^st century, Voltaire is a wonderful starting point. Because he takes himself seriously, mockingly. Which is a breathe of fresh air in the rather stultifying atmosphere of pedants and pundits, journalists, hypocrites, politicians, and other such critters.

            Consider for a second an informative interview with Rachid al-Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, a moderate Islamist political party, also known as the Renaissance Party. In this interview al-Ghannouchi praises the new Tunisian constitution (passed in January 2014), saying that he does not “regard it as a secular constitution, but as one that unites Islam, democracy and modernity.” Al-Ghannouchi rightly points out that “There are Christian democratic parties in many European countries, such as Germany; elsewhere, there are democratic parties with Buddhist or Hindu backgrounds. Why should there not be Islamic democratic parties?”

            As a new-world Hamlet may have said under these circumstances: this, is entirely the question! Why do Enlightenment nations continue to insist on sharing the covers of civil society with institutions of religion dedicated to anti-Enlightenment values and goals? Per Voltaire and Jefferson, Enlightenment societies are deliberately and philosophically constructed so as to keep competing ‘powers’ separate in the civic life of the polis. The argument framing the core of Secularism as a sublunary and philosophical ideal, is precisely the guarantee of freedoms in order to prevent “the perversion of power into tyranny.” This, explains Jefferson, is why the role of education in the civil society is especially important:

“The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny]”, are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes” (Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526).

The religious worldview, the very spirit of religion, is per se authoritarian; it is the incarnation of a totalitarian mindset. The Apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 13 that “all authority is given by god…” Of course it is; and as an anchoring idea, this one means that all religions, or at the very least, all theistic religions, including Christianity, are structurally and formally theocratic, and that they therefore stand in opposition to the wider conception of the liberal democracy. This is axiomatic. The convert is called upon to commit to the total ‘truth’ of the vision, to the dictatorship of ‘The Truth’, then to submit to the authority of the ‘Truth’s’ divine representative. Thus, to turn al-Ghannouchi’s expression back upon himself as the representative of politicized Islam: “If you sow dictatorship, you harvest terrorism.”

            In his interview, however, al-Ghannouchi wanders around in an irrational, and even fanatic labyrinth of disingenuous equivocation, and for the greater disinformation of his under-informed reading audience, equivocates between “moderate secularism” and “moderate Islam,” as though secularism is also, by definition, some sort of religious ‘opinion’ or ‘point of view’. And yet precisely the opposite is the case: if the notion of Enlightenment that inspired Voltaire and Jefferson is to survive as a philosophical ideal, then the concept of Secularism as an Enlightenment value must be more fully and forcefully integrated into civil society. Which brings us round full circle back to Voltaire.

            The following translation (Phrontisterion 2015) is composed of excerpted, and selected juicier bits from Voltaire’s rather lengthy analysis of “Fanaticism,” section II (from Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, tome 7, Dictionnaire philosophique, I, Paris: Furne et Cie, 1847, 562-564.)

“If this expression [Fanaticism] is still linked to its original sense, it is surely only by a slender thread.

            Fanaticus used to be an honorable title, signifying one who is a servant or benefactor of a temple. […] [But] does the word fanaticus mean in this place [in Cicero’s text], a demented fanatic, a pitiless fanatic, a horrible fanatic, as one uses it today? Or, rather, does it signify pious, consecrator, a man who is religious, a devout supporter of temples? Is this word in Cicero an insult or ironic praise? […]

            Today one understands fanaticism as somber and cruel religious folly. It is a sickness of the mind that one catches like smallpox. Meetings and speeches are more often responsible for its transmission than books. Reading a book rarely fires one up; because then reason calms us down again. But when a speaker who is ardent and possessed of a wonderful imagination begins talking to poorer intellects, his eyes are on fire, and this fire gets communicated; his speech intonations and his gestures spark all the nerves in the audience. He shouts: God is watching, sacrifice to Him that which is nothing more than human; fight the battles of the Lord: and we go off and fight.

            Fanaticism is to superstition what euphoria is to fever, and what rage is to anger. Whoever has ecstatic trances, and visions, whoever takes his dreams for realities, and his imaginings for prophesies, is a novice fanatic of great promise: he may soon kill for the love of God.  

            Bartholomew Diaz was a professed fanatic. He had a brother in Nuremberg, Jean Diaz, who was nothing more than a fervent Lutheran, heartily convinced that the Pope is the Antichrist, and that he was marked with the sign of the Beast. Bartholomew, who was even more persuaded that the Pope was God on earth, left Rome in order to convert or to kill his brother: he assassinated him. That was just perfect; but then we also rendered justice for justice to this Diaz.   

            Polyeucte, who goes regularly to temple, and on a high holy day knocked over and broke the statues and ornaments, is a fanatic less horrible than Diaz, but not less idiot. The assassins of Duke François de Guise, of William of Orange, of King Henry III, and of King Henry IV, and of so many others, were maniacs sick with the same rage as Diaz.

            The absolutely best example of fanaticism is that of those bourgeois in Paris who, the night of the Saint-Bartholomew, ran around assassinating, cutting throats, defenestrating, and hacking to bits their neighbors who did not go to Mass. Guyon, Patouillet, Chaudon, Nonotte, and the ex-Jesuit Paulian, are nothing more than street-corner fanatics, wretches nobody pays attention to: but then, on a day like the Saint-Bartholomew, they go and do big things.

            There are cold-blooded fanatics, like the judges who condemn to death those whose only crime is not to think like they think. And these judges are all the more guilty, all the more worthy to be execrated by the human species, because, not being carried away by an onset of rabid passion like the Clements, the Chastels, the Ravaillacs, and the Damiens, it would seem like they could still hear the voice of reason.

            There is no other remedy to this epidemic infection than the philosophical spirit, which, transmitted from neighbor to neighbor, finally softens men’s manners; and this prevents the onset of the disease. Because as soon as the disease begins to make progress, everyone has to flee and wait until the air is pure again. Laws and religion cannot withstand the plague of the soul. Religion, far from being a salutary sustenance for the soul, becomes poison in infected brains. These wretches continually have in their minds the example of Aod, who assassinated King Eglon; of Judith, who cut off Holophernes’ head while sleeping with him; of Samuel, who hacked King Agag into bits; of the priest, Joad, who assassinated his queen in the stable doorway; etc., etc., etc. They see only these examples, which, while they may have been respectable in Antiquity, are become repulsive in our time. These unfortunates draw their fury from the same religion that condemns them.

            Our laws are still largely powerless to stop this rabid onslaught: it is as if you were reading statutory bylaws to a fanatic. These are folks who are persuaded that the holy spirit spurring them on is above our laws, and that their fervor is the only law they should observe.

            What does one respond to a man who says to you that he prefers obeying God rather than men, and who, as a result, is sure to win heaven by cutting your throat? Like gangrene, once fanaticism has reached the brain, the infection is almost incurable. I have seen convulsionaires who, all the while speaking of the miracles of Saint Paris, gradually got themselves all worked up: their eyes became enflamed, their whole body started trembling, their faces became disfigured with fury, and they would have killed anyone who would have contradicted them.

            Yes, I have seen these convulsionaires; I have seen them foam at the mouth and twist their arms and legs around. They would cry out: “We need blood.” They succeeded in getting their king assassinated by one of his domestics, and finally settled on just going after philosophers.

            It is almost always conniving rascals who drive fanatics onwards, and who put the knife in their hands. These rascals are like the Old Man in the Mountain who, according to legend, used to give idiots a foretaste of the joys of paradise, who would promise them an eternity of the pleasures they tasted with him, on the condition that they would go and assassinate everyone that he would indicate to them. There has only ever been one religion in the world that has not been contaminated by fanaticism, and that is the one practiced by educated Chinese. Their sects of philosophers were not only exempt from this plague, but they were in fact the remedy for it; because the result of philosophy is to calm the soul, and fanaticism is incompatible with tranquility of spirit.

            If our sainted religion has often been corrupted by this infernal frenzy, we have only the folly of men to blame.”

Further reading:

·      Tunisia at the Crossroads: An Interview with Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouch @ http://africacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Noureddine-Jebnoun_Tunisia-at-the-Crossroads_April-2014.pdf

·      An article (FR) by Monique Legrand containing a significant excerpt of Voltaire’s entry on « Fanatisme » @ http://www.ecoledeslettres.fr/actualites/education/fanatisme-article-du-dictionnaire-philosophique-portatif-de-voltaire-1764/

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