Carlo Suarès : Critique of Reason Impure : The society of men is not a species

(Extract from Critique of Reason Impure by Carlo Suarés. 1955 Stock Edition)

We can now, without misunderstandings, resume the examination of our piece of iron and our pebble; switch to plant life; considerations on insect societies; ask ourselves when and how the unconscious for-itself becomes a conscious for-me; how are the different forms of the subjective in Nature compared to each other; in short, to examine the contradictions between the there is and what there is, between radiation and mass; and all along these reflections, of this walk through what precedes the man, to retain what we will be able to recognize in ourselves, that is to say to name in human terms. This transposition of natural facts into human values will obviously be only an allegory.

We have seen that the simplest aggregates, those whose elements are homogeneous, have no other reactions (chemical, physical) than those provoked in them by the outside world, in the manner of a fatality. Iron is available and always defeated by the same attacks. There is no need to trick him: his balance is eminently unstable because of his stability. From the inorganic to the organic world, the provisional equilibria are less and less static, adhere more and more to variations in the environment. The way in which the different specific equilibria are broken up by the movement there is, constitutes the set of natural laws. Thus the natural laws are the result of reactions and these, by their frequency and by the modifications of the there, tend to modify themselves. As a result, natural laws are constantly changing. The Universe is not a rigidly constructed building; it does not obey immutable laws of mechanics, but, on the contrary, is an amorphous and plastic continuum, in perpetual transformation. There is something unexpected in any reaction. We are told about the "sensitivity" of metals, their "fatigability", and the new and prodigious calculating machines go so far as to seem to have a nervous system, as they are sometimes "capricious and irritable" or on the contrary " in a good mood ". We have come to treat them as robots and to show them the consideration due to conscious beings.

And, through the mineral, vegetable, animal kingdoms, we do not know where consciousness begins as perception and consciousness as volition, or even if there is a border between them. We don't know about ourselves. Fakirs manage to stop the beating of the heart , the process of which seems to us to get out of control; on the other hand, when we believe that we can correct some of our tendencies, astrologers tell us that they are determined by constellations. All beings in nature are mysteries; bats have radars; eels know geography; ants, bees, exchange precise information between them. From the inorganic to the highest levels of the organic, we do not know what is reaction to the medium, and what is response. It is nevertheless easy and banal to note that the objects only integrate into the there is by resisting to the there is, either by the elimination of the greatest possible number of possible (the purity of the diamond makes its hardness), either by appealing to the greatest possible number of possibilities (man's flexibility is his safeguard). Objects, animated beings, species, are found at all levels of this double resistance. Their for-themselves are temporary balances, made up of two contrasting forms of balance. The there is triumph over the perpetual ruptures of equilibrium of what there is and what there is is only there by triumphing over the incessant movement of the there is. Conversely, the there is (infinity) is perpetually defeated by the fact that all that there is is a renouncement of possibilities that had not happened. (Except in man, if he learns to die perpetually, that is to say to live the for-itself until the end of its curve). The for-itself, from mineral to human, is a contradiction in the search for stability. Sometimes it is found and enthroned : a petrified forest in a desert is the image of a triumphant for-itself. Likewise, a dried, unripe fruit, which remains on the tree, asserts its existence as an object. But the fruit which ripens, falls and delivers its nucleus which will become a tree. A cell defends itself only by becoming two cells. In order not to die, it multiplies. In order not to lose ground, it is gaining ground. The more it gains, the more the cells organize themselves by specialization. The more specialized the cells of an organism, the less specialized the organism. In other words, it acquires the freedom not to react automatically to impacts. The variations of the environment do not affect it to the point of transforming it into "something else", like a metal into an oxide, or a fruit, a flower, a vegetable, into a new variety. And, being unable to transform, it perishes more easily. What he gained in security he lost in security: he is more vulnerable because he is less so.

The truth is that he transferred his acquisitions to the species, his embryo of freedom and conscience to the species; in short, its for-itself in the species, and it keeps it and defies the centuries.

The insect world is the only one that, translated, transposed into human signs, is horrible and monstrous. Let's look at a termite hill. We see insects of three or four different types. We see workers and warriors who, according to their specialized powers and functions, are developed in certain parts of their bodies. In fact, we only see females: sterilized females. Males are absent. The role of the workers is to secrete the substance of which the termite hill is made. They are of two types, because the first secrete by the mouth and this one is enormous, the others by the intestine whose opening is constantly gaping. They secrete non-stop. The warriors have excessive pliers but are unable to feed themselves: nurturers are there for this purpose. Warriors who do not fight are not fed and die, being useless. Conversely, the workers have no defense: those who stop working are immediately and easily killed. These morphological differences are obtained by the shape and the special arrangement of the cells where the larvae are placed. Throughout the termite mound, a single female received the space and food necessary for her full development, and a few larvae were manipulated to generate males. Having reached adulthood, the future mother was fertilized and returned from her marriage with the male organs - instantly dead - attached to the abdomen. The other males, useless and who only served as a reserve, were immediately killed. Fertilized once and for all, the mother was placed in the center of the termite hill and began to swell. She acquired a volume ten times greater than that of her companions. She is nothing more than a gigantic belly, incapable of moving, to which, like a wart is attached a head of normal size. Impotent, phenomenal, immobile and slimy, the mother now lays mechanically, without stopping, one egg every second. The day she lays less, we will kill her and we will make another one. This is the spectacle offered by the best organized termite society in the world. The termite hill is made of very fine cement, but which only crumbles with explosives; its galleries, passageways, accesses, and communications are masterpieces of ingenuity; it has sophisticated aeration and ventilation systems; temperature regulators; the traffic is admirably regulated, despite its density. In all respects, termite life is perfect; as well, it is useless to describe it further.

The contradiction was only between the individual and the for-itself. Between the species and the for-itself, there is an identity of function. The species is flesh, the flesh is functional, its purpose is in itself, its activity is called organization. And between organization and efficiency, there is also identity. A function fulfilled, must be done well, must be done as best as possible. Its imperfection will never be what it can be for a work of art: a quality; because a function is only comparable to itself (Gothic imperfection touches us compared to classical perfection; the imperfections of Matisse or Picasso are more beautiful than perfectly executed academic paintings; etc ..., etc ...). So, if the individual is a social function, he must be perfectly so. If it is wrong, there are no more limits to recklessness, irresponsibility, sabotage. On the other hand, if it is, the maximum efficiency it can achieve is incalculable. For this purpose, specialization is necessary. The Nazis had already undertaken the study of the means suitable for specializing the children before their birth, by a treatment of the mother. In a few generations, lower peoples such as French and Italian would have produced only obtuse peasants, destined to feed the race of the masters. I think the only problem was the injection of intelligence into them.

But let's leave this nonsense there. The empire of the species over the individual depends on its degree of organization. This being nonexistent in plant species, a plant can at any time become the prototype of a new variety. Being perfect in certain insects, this is where it works best. In humans there is confusion between society and species, because through all the reasons in the world, society continues to put pressure on minds in order to crystallize into species. And on this register - as on all that matters - our eternal enemy brothers, believers and materialists, by opposing each other completely, look like two twins.

Materialists want me to be a geometric place, defined by the place I occupy according to production; they want any thought that does not start by situating themselves in relation to production to be devoid of content: "we, the fellow filmmakers of the Un-tel factory, located in ... assembled on such date, where production was Think that. The appearance of reason that this point of view may contain, I developed it enough when, with regard to Descartes and others, I criticized the false annihilation of a character who, having made himself, does not wants to see more. But I have no less explained the reverse process, of the creator who, through the play of the innumerable characters who haunt him, in turn or simultaneously, continues to release the value of men: their unity. And if, in doing so, I am neither a turner, a waiter, nor anything that lets itself be conditioned by production relationships; if, different in this from bewildered Nicodemus, I make mine the words: you must be born again. The wind blows where it wants, and you hear the noise; but you don't know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with any man who is born of the Spirit, I am the petty bourgeois wandering. Jesus was a petty bourgeois who wandered. Materialistic society will always ask me who I am, where I come from, where I am going, and will not accept that I do not say it: it will tell me so.

The others, the canonical defenders of the spirit, for whom this phrase of Jesus is sublime, will tell me too. And they tell me already, by utterly mute, utterly silent, utterly unanimous reprobation, with which they envelop my writings. This is because there is no measure common to these two societies: there is the species society of the termite hill or the society where one is one with men and God, being nothing and blowing where it pleases. There is no dimension, well or very badly cut, which puts us a bit in a mound, a little in divine society. A little bit of (psychological) taxation, (cultural) shaping, conformism (good thinking), with a view to protecting the (French) family, (National) institutions, (collective) heritage, etc. and the mind no longer blows at all where it wants, no longer blows at all.

Democrats (lay) and humanitarian (free-thinkers) have other proposals: abandon the for-me (individual) in favor of a for-us (fraternal). It is the great idea of our time. We have to get out of self-centeredness, broaden our horizons, think on a European scale, on a global scale. But if the individual abandons the for-itself and donates it to a collective, the latter immediately becomes a species and mutilates it functionally. Because this stripping, this sacrifice of oneself, what is it if it is not a devastation caused by the social-man, by the man-who-has-defined-himself-in-function-of -the collectivity, in short by a cog, already partially irresponsible, of a machine? This devastation, this plunder, this large-scale move, this transfer from the for-me to the for-us, empties the individual to the extent that he fills it. He, who is nothing, is now involved in the Pantheon, the Arc de l'Etoile , Versailles, St-Denis. Or, integrating himself into some other species, of which he will bear the stigmata (intellectual, psychological, physical) with as much satisfaction, he will be a missionary, union activist, anarchist. One day, during one of the countless battles fought by species, he will be maimed. From then on, and until the end of his life, he would poison the world with the demonstrations of the Association of Veterans Affairs, Former Resistants, Former This or Anti-That, which saved species that we no longer remember , by the sacrifice of a species that never existed.

SPECIES AND HUMANS

Species need each other because they eat each other. On earth, in the air, in the waters, there are continual carnages. Surviving species are those that are not eaten more than they eat. Man, to establish his reign on earth, gradually eliminated dangerous species and fashioned, raised those on which he feeds. In addition, human societies, functioning as species, destroyed each other, with no apparent biological purpose: the Spaniards exterminated the Incas, the Turks the Armenians, the Germans the Jews of Central Europe. What survives is the chance of the balance sheets. The there is is made of what remains. The survivors are neither the strongest nor the best suited, but those who were where their fellows were not killed. In view of these perpetual battles, the species have developed defenses and attacks, systems of protection and aggression. Thus, species are machines for recording experiences: totalizing machines. These tabulations, by fixing the means of survival, fix the species also. It is a state of contradiction, but inevitable: the organization of the past, as a defense of the species, fixes it in an adaptation of which it defines the limits. Thus, the species can only fight against the predictable made in the image of past events, and succumbs to the unpredictable, to which it can only oppose variations on recorded themes.

Against the incessant changes there is, the species organize their resistances: they make "mass"; and, irrationally, grant security to the individuals who compose them, only in inverse proportion to their degree of evolution. Biologically, higher mammals are infinitely more advanced than insects. But the stray dog is more clueless than the termite. In allegorical language, I am tempted to say that the there is acts "against". Not only does it act against everything there is, but the development and evolution that Nature obtains in organisms, acts more and more against them, making them more and more vulnerable. Termites devour everything they encounter: as they pass, whole houses collapse, emptied of their substance; and sheltered in their imperturbable cement fortresses (which reach several meters high), they defy the centuries. Locked in the circle of their own activity, they don't even have enemies. Their security triumphs. Similar to this waste which, sheltered near the shore, goes in circles indefinitely and is not swept away by the current of the river, the termite mounds are abandoned by "the spirit that blows where it wants". Their toil, their incessant activity, making them invariable, are the female victory over the spirit: what does it matter, therefore, victory? These societies of cripples are congregations of the dead. What to say? Is the "spirit" therefore masculine?

The very simple contradiction between the balance-mass and the balance-radiation, according to which everything is located, determines the sexes and their functions in species. The female is centripetal. It closes around the germ, to which it gives substance, gravity and mass. The male is centrifuged. He is physically and psychically. He throws away his life, projects it out of himself, and goes so far as to project himself entirely into his own destruction. Nothing is more instructive on this subject than a cockfight, where the adversaries, irresistibly electrified, seem to fulfill their destinies by striving until death. The herds consist only of females and castrates. The rams, the bulls, would make there an indescribable disorder. On the other hand, the queen bee returns home after the nuptial flight where the male, in a single act, exhaled his life and made useless the presence of the males, and therefore, everything goes in order, definitively: the hive comes alive and will remain lively; honey will be made and will accumulate. But the price of this honey is the destruction of everything else possible. Life and the consciousness of living are caught in a dead end.

I imagine the consciousness of an anthill operating in a manner quite analogous to that of this sleeper whose for-itself had been identified with an incessant search for orange blossom water. We remember that doing this chase, on roller skates, all along imaginary mountain ranges, was the very form assumed by the for-itself-sleep, enclosed in its own protection. The success of the protection had overturned consciousness in the need for action driven by a ceaseless, uniform, unshakable movement. This had snapped up just enough awareness to identify it with the urgency of looking for orange blossom water, and had wiped out the rest of the consciousness: all that, by asking the slightest questioning, would have broken the myth and broken the hypnotic charm. And this research, necessarily sterile, had neither hope nor despair; neither expectation nor frustration ; neither joy nor pain. It did not include resignation either: all these value judgments exist only by comparison. There was not to be in a situation, but a situation for itself, which was its own doing. Ants, active, hasty, pressed, eager, come and go, come and go. Functional societies function to function. This is their postulate, their creed, their ethics. "Business as usual".

Societies are in any case female. They always are, all the time and by definition. Hence their incompatibility with what taught the one who, so rightly, called himself the Son of Man. They are, because they are called accumulation, heritage, protection, experience, institutions. They are because they are called Past and Values. They are, because they crystallized from their origin around social and economic relationships, around representations of man and the Universe, around family relationships, national and international, which have necessarily aged a year by year, from idea to idea. But these human species (in reality pre-human), unlike animal species, contain in their breasts the elements of destruction, which, from catastrophe to catastrophe, tend towards human hatching. Indeed, animal species, from the least evolved to the most evolved, imprint on the individuals who belong to them, the stigmata of insurmountable barriers that they oppose to the possible refused. The animal, at birth, expresses a preponderance of the past over the indeterminate. The self-protection reactions of the whole past of the species are what define the activity of the young chick who, when he comes out of the egg , behaves like a little mechanical ascent. As for the morphological definitions of species, they are discovered throughout the evolution that the human fetus is going through . This fetus passes through the forms assumed by the species and does not stop there, and the species, with each progression, recognize themselves as fixations of moments that it exceeds.

It is here that my allegory would like to be able to fit into the prodigious epic poems - so poorly understood - of Genesis, of the Exodus, of the Prophets and of the Gospels. Because all the human drama is in this whipped, harassed germ, expelled from each of the shelters which request the stop, the birth, the fixation of the species. Throughout, this invitation to rest, to security, to passive survival, attracted the seed of the Lord, and it did not resist its enchanting hold. Seized, enthralled by the magic of the Big Female, he found himself definitively transformed into fish, dog, monkey, salt statue. But, despite himself, a part of him, rummaged beyond the limits of what he could bear, seems to have fallen into the unspeakable suffering of an obstinate refusal, where, losing life and consciousness, the germ s is found beyond itself, in the state of mutation that this refusal would imply. Man does not descend from the monkey. Is fixed in the simian state the germ which could not become the cruel anthropopithecus gorged with blood. The game of two balances; static and dynamic; that of the Flesh and that of the Breath; that of Number and that of Infinity (whatever their names!) has constantly distributed the losses and the gains, but by playing who loses wins.

The species, being a mechanization of the past, the individuals who compose it cannot, at any time, integrate into the consciousness of the present. Their armor of instincts gives them instant access to the world, but only through the openings of their specializations. In species more flexible than those condemned by insects, the degree of educability of individuals is far from having been established. In particular, in domesticated species, whose security is assumed by man and where, consequently, the instinct of conservation is almost destroyed, it is very difficult to discern the intellectual and psychological qualities likely to develop in the interior of the void that has thus arisen. We have seen dogs and horses able to read, write and succeed in complicated calculations. Beast pets rightly grant them deep feelings and complex intelligence. However, whatever these qualities, no beast will be universally located in space and time, as an interrogation about its being. It is indeed obvious that, as intelligent as a dog is, he will never transcend the magic circle in which his morphological condition, very limited compared to that of man, is enclosed. Whatever we do for him, we cannot undo his birth, which takes place in the distant past of the universal germ, during one of the innumerable stages where he did not want to stop

And we come to man or, at least, to the approximation of man that we represent. Here, the organism at birth is the most flexible and plastic that the Earth has yet given birth to. In him, the accumulated automatisms of cash are routed. In him, the past is silent, distraught, having lost even the memory of experiences. In him, the duration of Times has ended its frantic course in order to catch up with the Present. In him is the culmination, not of the adaptations which fixed the species, but of the ruptures of adaptations with a view to adaptations more and more delicate and precise. In him, all possible avenues are silent awaiting the unpredictable contact of this plastic wonder and the Present. In him, the Earth has finally developed its response to the there is, to the eternal Present of the there is, to its freshness, to its spontaneity. Behold: the past has receded; it no longer weighs on this eminently virgin flesh; he does not imprint in his conscience the knowledge and do it and recognize it and choose it; neither the protections, nor the resistances, nor finally all by which the species lead their self-mutilating struggles against the ineffable vital current of there is. Look at the. The Child is there. And what does it do? He sleeps, he realizes nothing.

The Present gave him his ineffable kiss. This being is so delicate that, we are told, the distant stars have marked it with the scent of their conjunction ...

Eh ... But this is where everything spoils, and turns into a devilish mockery. Because this being is such a marvelous response to the Present, that, more vulnerable than the softest of soft waxes, everything is imprinted in it pell-mell, at random contingencies. Soon, just now, right away, this masterpiece of virginity will be nothing more than an inextricable scramble of imprints.

It does not matter whether the catastrophe occurs during what has been called the trauma of birth or from the first movements of intrauterine life: it inevitably occurs in everyone. Each of us received as a gift the grace of being touched by the presence of the Present. By the way, I'm not sure what these words mean. I would like to express everything that an absolutely new being, absolutely washed from the past, would experience on contact with the mysterious presence of the there is, if, precisely, his virginity, his purity, had not swept away everything in him, leaving nothing . There is a total contradiction there, the very one that expels man out of everything that would define him in his perception. The primordial and pure perception of there is, being new, is not known perception. The child is sleeping. In him, the mystery has bent over itself; perhaps the ineffable recognized himself in the Number of the Universe; perhaps he whispered his name ... And the child, growing up, will hasten to resemble everyone , that is to say, the ugliest, the meanest, the stupidest beings that the Earth can form.

* * *

And now, from Profundis: from the bottom of the abyss cry out to the Lord; pray, invoke Heaven, beg; go to church; this will only serve to bury you further. Read five hundred thousand words of ontology, theology, philosophy, and you will bury yourself again. Study. Get psychoanalyzed. Practice yoga. You will also bury yourself. As well, for my part, I feel that my writing is about to end abruptly, because I have nothing to say yet that I did not say ad nauseam. [ed. note ... and then]

I wanted, among other things, to follow logically the irrational development of the internal contradiction which is the essence of all there is, and to pursue it until its paradoxical burst in man. I chose simple words for this purpose. I could have chosen others, and the allegory would have been different. I do not pretend to have expressed a truth in terms of truth: words are only images and a representation is only valid insofar as, fading away, it opens the way to the indefinable. It was important to me to unravel the internal research proper to any man worthy of the name, betrayals of the truth that are religions and ontological blabla; I believe I have shown, for this purpose, that the use of words without content always masks the will to establish a static balance, based on past notions (thought is never more than a frozen past), therefore in perpetual disagreement with the Present. The science of being and the Present, (the living there) never meet.

The Good News of a Revelation is not Revelation: the word of Jesus is only true if one is one with him; if you are one with the truth, its fragrance is that of spring.

There is a simple way to approach yourself and approach the World in a state of Knowledge. But, for that, you must not be a doctor.

The state of total stupor in front of there is, where all the being remains suspended, is too naked, too deeply, too irremediably religious to be perceived by a priest. Because all representation dies at this threshold, and priests are merchants of representations. In the absolute vacuum of the finding "there is", there is nothing to sell. There is nothing to believe. There is nothing to gain. No religion could resist this terribly religious suspension of faculties. As well they knock him out with their creeds, their proofs, their repetitions of gestures and words. The unthinkable mystery of there is quickly camouflaged. And the stupid struggle, within there is, to establish a semblance of psychic duration is immediately organized, led by religions, thanks to the stratagem which makes Eternity pass for an "eternity of time", an "eternity of duration", an "always".

During this witchcraft, we - each of us - who were touched even if only in our childhood, by the fast wing of the creative boom, there we are metamorphosed in the fashion of the old tales of fairies: transformed into pre-humans, into post-anthropopithecus, with sweet songs of religious hymns, guided by our parents, pushed by our comrades, forced by society. But whoever has lived the unthinkable down to the most secret fibers of his conscience, gradually realizes that a sort of enchanted key has been put in his hands, which will defeat the bad witchcraft of the merchants. This key will open everything there is, in the there is, and show him at work the curious contradictory mechanism by which everything there is goes to his death, good or bad. The good is the one who undoes what there is, in submission to the there is (I do the will of the Father, says Jesus), the bad is the one who hardens what there is, against what there is at. And it also happens that the bad defeats what there is, not fighting enough against the there is, and that the good hardens what there is, in acceptance of the gift of life. This is where the doctors get lost, in pursuit of syllogisms.

But the key deciphers the interior signs in man, and this reading has the primary effect of silencing us. One cannot at the same time read these signs and talk, read these signs and recite his breviary, read these signs and think of a theory. If it is true that Nature created us plastic and that the living imprint of the Present is buried in us; if that is true, what has become of this freshness? Was it not covered by a very fine peel of reactions, then by another, and still others, in innumerable quantities, like by layered layers of living substance, but more and more complex and more and more organized, so as to transform into automatisms (much needed) everything that the child learned, from birth to adolescence, and then all that the adolescent has accumulated and finally what the adult has hoarded? All this in the manner of a cocoon which has coiled, locked up, tied around itself? And what's in there? Is there something ? Or, on the contrary, is there precisely nothing, nothing but the ineffable unthinkable response from the Present to the Present? And what are we? Are we this motionless cocoon, embellished in itself? Are we this appearance? Are we this inextricable jumble of threads wrapped around themselves? Yes, we are that. But this is precisely what must "lose his life" if the other, the unspeakable, must reappear.

We have spun and woven every day of our existence and buried our life in this shroud. And now De Profundis: claim from the abyss. Who will ever hear you? Heaven is empty when man is sterile.

Have we had spiritual experiences? Their memories murdered them. The happiness we felt killed them. Certainty, the cry of joy, ecstasy murdered them. Because these delectable emotions have been added to the perceived, the tasted, the compared, the known, the past, the fabric weft today. Do we "once again" taste this ineffable? So it's not him. Perhaps he accidentally surprised us once. But if we "felt" it was because he was no longer there. There is no possible encounter between the new and the old. And "who" was there to welcome him? Are we? ... Are we something other than a past, and is a past something other than protection? What a defensive system? What a fortified organization?

If it is true, I say, that Nature created us plastic and that the living imprint of the Present is buried in us, what are we, at the heart , at the center of this imprint, if not the virgin ability to undergo it? The word undergo is inadequate: there is a capacity to respond. And the answer is also inadequate: there is the possibility of creating the Present. But what creates, if not the uncreated? I think that at the outset, there is, in each of us, a preponderance of creation. There is a physiological break in the fabrications in favor of a curve, unique in each. That a number of possibilities are determined by heredity and the environment, this seems to me to have only a descriptive interest, just as in physiology we study the composition of tissues, a study that can leave the athlete indifferent. What matters is that the nothing at all, locked in the cocoon of his self, one day flies away. From the state of a chrysalis, this living prisoner who is nothing, will he escape, blowing breath wherever he wants? That is the question, not to be or not to be, which has no meaning, but are we that nothing at all, enclosed in the cocoon of the self? No: we are the cocoon, become goal-in-itself, end-in-itself, and "I am", and "I know myself", and "I identify with myself" and "I last", and "I am spark", and "I am a piece of a divine cocoon, Atman, Personal God", and the rest.

And everything of which we are thus made is the opposite, the opposite, the negation of that nothing at all, locked up, that is the uncreated in us. Have I said it enough, and it can't go on, because that's how humanity will blow itself up?

When I started this book, I wanted to show the depth of the crisis in which we are all struggling. I wish some people saw it unfathomable. There is no common value between the pre-human species that we are and the struggle we undertake for a Genesis beyond the species: for a mutation. The terrible adventure of consciousness is its power to destroy itself by asserting itself. The spontaneous and discontinuous for-itself of the child builds, quite naturally, the cocoon necessary for a consciousness abandoned by the automatisms of instinct. The crystallization, the identification of the consciousness and its cocoon is inevitable, since the cocoon takes over the whole experience. The unbeliever imprisoned at the center of this uninterrupted development is expressed only by volcanic eruptions, incomprehensible, confusing, sometimes agonizing, and which oppose the consciousness-entity until plunging it into disarray. We have all known, in our childhood, moments when our conscience seemed to capsize in the nameless terror of the void where it plunged absurd but deep questions like a deadly disease: how is it that I am just me, me, not another ? And that the world is precisely this one? And what would have happened if I were another? And if my parents were not them Etc ... Etc ... We have all known false memories, imaginary memories, extravagant worlds, unreal entities that come and go in the consciousness of the child. The parents hasten to oppose to them the evidence of their conditioning, the solid and robust reality of their prefabricated world. The child who is not adapted to this pre-human species is a concern, a problem, an object of reprobation and shame. The educators, and especially the priests of all religions, grind the unbeliever alive, shape the child, mutilate him by instilling in him the terror of punishments and the sweetness of submissions and absolutions. Nothing is sweeter than the smile of grown-ups haloing the young conformist, the wise child, the good student. The pre-human species has all the weapons for them, and the riches of all possessions. There is no common measure between this world, taken as a whole, and the terrible inner cry of the stifled mind.

The best of these weapons is thought. It is she who, by witchcraft, brings up the dead past and gives it new life. It is only made from the past, this is obvious, since it only manipulates what it can integrate into what it knows. Also, measuring its weakness, we have long delegated to its aid the panacea called intuition. Metaphysical intuition is endowed with the admirable power to direct thought in the universe of words without content and thus allow it to give definitions of words that it does not understand. We have seen, analyzed, criticized this Comedy. There is no need to come back to it, except to take a last overall look at the majestic and solemn assembly of philosophers, scholars, theologians and saints that, for centuries , accumulates around it the pre-human species, condemned to destroy itself. This prodigious sum of intelligences offers to our admiration everything that makes up our cultural heritage. To reject this heritage in its entirety, because its base, its foundation, as adequate as it has been in the past, is erroneous, false, perverted, decomposed today, because of the acceleration of Time (including we have already spoken) you must allow yourself to be overcome by extreme humility, by the naked simplicity of the mind.

Because, if we reject this past, it is ourselves that we reject and is it possible? But there is an antinomy which consists in absorbing, integrating (to accomplish, as Jesus said) and that is what is possible and necessary. It does not involve so many studies or grimoires. This simplicity of mind is an inner maturation and, similarly, a devitalization of what sheltered it: of what I compared to a cocoon. This simplicity of mind is, in short, a transfer of vitality. And if all of my allegory makes an image, we can see that we die today, that we kill ourselves and we destroy ourselves today, because of all our protections. Intellectual and psychological protection. Armed protectons. Both have become ends to themselves. If you want to live, you have to stop protecting yourself.

And stop organizing. In short, could we decide to take seriously, to take to the letter, the precepts of Jesus, when he asked us not to think about tomorrow, not to defend ourselves, not to protect us?

It is, of course, extremely difficult to perceive this reversal of values, on all registers, with enough acuteness to prolong its focus in ourselves. And even when this conversion occurs in us, it is devilishly difficult to keep it there. Because it is devilishly easy and natural to fall back at all times into the inertia of the known, automatisms, passive resistances. And it is completely useless to react against these requests, to force oneself to refuse them, because this resistance would be the very resistance against which one would imagine fighting and which would set up the fight itself. It would be based on some idea, on an ethics, on an aspiration towards human unity, on a definition - or at least a notion of the human, on a framework of representations prepared in order to receive the new breath - born, as if one could foresee the unforeseeable and think the unthinkable.

On the contrary, it is a total and very vulnerable availability which results from this "inner lucidity, constantly on the alert, suspended in the perception of itself through all the layers of consciousness" (Krishnamurti) . But faced with this demand for consciousness restored to itself and intelligence reinstated in its function, it is very difficult to admit that this is where the solution to the global crisis lies. The difficulty, not only of implementing this lucidity, but of even understanding what it consists of, should reduce to a very small number the people willing to devote themselves to it. And can this work, which is entirely individual, have a social impact? For a long time I formulated these objections, or rather, I opposed them to Krishnamurti, in passionate discussions. I saw him choose the longest and frailest path, as if, to put out a fire, we went away, with a dowsing rod, in search of a trickle of underground water. But, over the years, I saw our firefighters, under their hairstyles of temporal or spiritual leaders, fueling the fire with everything they invented to put it out. I saw the establishment, in most minds, of the confusion between the catastrophic action carried out by men who identified with the collective unconscious of a nation, a religion, a group in a state of egocentric assertion as opposed to other groups, and such isolated action which could result from a man, from a single one, emerging on the contrary from the soul-group of a herd. His conduct would not necessarily be marked with the seal of scholarship, nor with an in-depth knowledge of philosophical systems, from Antiquity to the present day. It would be limited perhaps to a simple and naive gesture, which would be exhausted immediately expressed.

Without wanting to evaluate that of Garry Davies, which consisted of one day sitting on the edge of a sidewalk, in front of the UN palace, and tearing up his American passport, by declaring himself a citizen of the world, it seems to me more far-reaching than the gigantic administrative apparatus implemented by the UN, UNESCO, NATO (or NATO), SHAPE, IACI., BII., IBRD (or IBFRD), BIS, BIT (or ILO) BRI (or BIS) CAC, CAT, CCA, CFS (or ECOSOC or ESC), CIJ (or ICJ.), ECAFE (or CEAEO,), ECE (or CEE), ECLA (or CEAL), FISE, GATT, ICEF, UNAC, UNICEF, ICAO, IMF, IRO, ITO, I U, OIR , WHO, ITU and some two or three thousand other organizations, which surround one hundred and fifty countries in a tight-knit network, in which each of us, designated by serial and serial numbers, has exchanged his identity against a police file. This mound of paperwork operates on its own, through a multitude of irresponsible public servants. No more than in a colony of insects can we know "who" directs, "who" leads, this extraordinary machine. It is made so as to dispense with a center of consciousness. In truth, she is not conscious, she is only intelligent. She does not tend towards anything, except towards her own enlargement. Each of his steps inevitably triggers the next step, on the slope that leads to war. In her there is nothing human. The gesture of a boy who tore up his passport has more meaning, more value, more content than all of these organizations. The rest of this story is well known: after having collected millions of useless signatures, vacillated between a bridge over the Rhine and the door of a military prison, having struggled in the conflicts that were already arising between several organizers of "Citizens" du Mond e, Garry Davies was given a new passport, and he was shipped to his country of origin. This little trickle of water hadn't lived long enough to head towards the fire

And it is good and natural that it was so. Everywhere, around us, we see many little men making these gestures, even smaller, more naive, and of even less scope. Honest, direct and simple gestures that the hustle and bustle of false values stifles. It is up to us to recognize them, and to make us recognize them. If our thinking is really deep and thoughtful, it will find itself on the same level as the most humble expressions of truth, because it will be humble. She will find herself in their spontaneity and will be blessed by it, because she will be her conscience and the perception she will have of herself. Thus will be found those who have gone around themselves and those who, destitute, will arrive directly. They will get along and get along already: the spirit of truth is one.

We are led to believe that this pre-human species will support a third world war; that it will come out of there as it is, in the identity that it claims to assume and make last; that it will be established, will be definitively re-established in the definitions which result from its past; that it will settle inside the frameworks, institutions, traditions, mythical beliefs which claim to fix the spirit at the time of Moses, the Buddha, or Pontius Pilate. No diagnosis of the state we are in now seems more false. To get sick, you have to be healthy: to endure an attack of plague or cholera, you have to be strong. We have passed this stage: war is a disease that we are no longer able to suffer.

If the worst happens, we will have generalized sepsis. We will have countless hotbeds of infection, of civil war, all over the world. For nothing: for the portrait of Eisenhower or Stalin and the silly idea that we will have of it. But it is then that the slightest true gesture, of the smallest little man, will acquire its full value. Where it happens, it will stop the conflict. He will put a limit on the crime. He will show, very simply, that killing each other is not the right way to find security. Around him - around each of us - will be the walkout; and the war, broken down, there will not take place.

* * *

And, depending on the extent to which I have managed to put content in the words of this work, and to encourage reflection, I hope that around life - short or long - that it will have, a little new arises: a peace of mind.

END

La société des hommes n'est pas espèce par Carlo Suarés - 3e emillinaire