A Socratic myth

_This text appeared in _ Cahiers des Saisons n° 10, April-May 1957.

Is Jean Paulhan a myth? Socratic myth? Did he ever make himself known? He is also wary of pure analysis which would be a principle of death. And man, he will say, knows himself all the less the more he looks at himself. But why also question him? It’s us that iol is questioning. Let's learn to answer the questions he asks us.

“We” is you and me, it’s everyone. Never was a humanist more human. For him, man is not an exiled God who must be taken from the earth to return him to his true homeland, the domain of pure spirits. The one to whom he addresses his questions is the ordinary man, who will object to neither Heidegger nor Descartes, but who will know how to listen to him, without more, once he sees himself placed before his own thoughts and the various facts.

Philosophers have stuck exclusively to a few privileged facts. They made us aware of our ignorance. Jean Paulhan, for his part, will not say: "What do I know?" but he shows us how our mind disfigures what it knows best and thinks it knows best. Reasoning is the great human adventure. The accidents that happen to man along his journey do not come from his curiosity, but from his logic.

“Common sense is the most shared thing in the world.” It’s understood. We still need to proceed methodically. But what would you say if it was precisely our methods or if you preferred our mental perspectives that best know how to deceive us? We will then see that there is nothing more paradoxical than common sense, whose illusions are tenacious. And this is certainly not due to any particular weakness of the layman who reasons poorly. Our mind, a strange mirror, is so made that it disfigures what it reflects.

So, Jean Paulhan will pursue him to his last entrenchments. Others have gone in search of the errors of the heart, but is the mind more reasonable than the heart? It has its subtle reasons that the heart ignores. He has his monsters, which the more numerous they are, seem flattering and plausible to him.

And how do we get rid of it? How can we capture at any moment this unreason which seems to be the normal state and the natural given of our mind, and which we find everywhere in these monstrous reasonings which run through the Halls or the Chamber every day? You should teach your friends, your concierge, to think correctly. But man does not live by right ideas. And we cannot separate thought from life. Our thoughts are not data that we could isolate from this mysterious background from which they emerge and which is all silence.

What were you thinking about just now? Nothing. Nothing that can be said; to nothing which, once expressed, loses its nature and its very nature.

There is silence that envelopes our thoughts. So to think correctly is first of all to make room for the mystery. Here we should perhaps listen to the words of the poets that Jean Paulhan interpreted for us in Clef de la Poésie. But who better than J.P. knows how to make us understand our thoughts and the various facts of our life, ourselves to ourselves?