de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  0:00  
This is Episode 19 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

Welcome to Episode 19 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius, the communications specialist at the Center. In this blockbuster episode, we welcome our Acting Director Patrick Deneen into the interviewer's chair to host a conversation with philosopher Remi Brague, professor emeritus of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne and Romano Guardini Chair of philosophy emeritus at the Ludwig Maximilian-University of Munich. Professor Brague is the author of many books, including his masterwork trilogy, "The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought" (2004), and "The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea" in 2007. The concluding volume will be released in October 2018 as part of the Center's book series Catholic Ideas for a Secular World with the title, "The Kingdom of Man: The Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project." Let's head into the Center's Marion Short Ethics Library for this week's conversation.

Patrick Deneen  1:35  
Professor Brague, thank you for joining us here today at the Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Patrick Deneen and I am serving as the acting director of the Center for Ethics and Culture in the spring of 2018. And I am delighted to have with us Professor Remi Brague, who is visiting with us for several days. He's participated in a faculty colloquium as well as a colloquium with some of our Sorin fellows and tonight, today, we have him in our offices here at the Center. Professor, you are the author of many, many books, many of which have been translated into English. Among them is the forthcoming book, "The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project" which will be published at the University of Notre Dame Press as part of the Center's series Catholic Ideas for a Secular World. In those many books and the many writings that you've published over the years, is there a theme or themes that you find to be at the heart of your inquiry that in some ways, binds together all of the various works that you've written?

Remi Brague  2:38  
Well, there are several Ariadne's clues in my academic pursuits, well first that is what I had to do as a university professor. I had to teach first and foremost, Greek philosophy. That's why I wrote two or three books on themes of Greek philosophy. Then I had to teach Arabic philosophy. Well, and because of this interest or this necessary interest for Greek and Arabic things, I was driven to give a bit of thought to the way in which European culture, the culture in which I sort of partake, or I'm trying to partake, on the one hand inherited a great deal of things from sources that are Greek and Hebrew in nature, and distinguished itself, on the other hand, from the neighboring culture of Islam. And this brought me, I hope, to a better understanding of what Western culture is all about. And this has kept me intellectually alive for some decades at present. And now, what I began before I had to retire, since we have to retire on the other side of the pond when we reach the, when we cross the boundary of 65, before I retired and know still more, I can devote my intellect, what is left of my intellectual energy to what is really interesting. For me, i.e. well, I will present a predicament. A philosophy is not that far from life that it should look down on the problems that we are facing that we have been facing for some decades or perhaps even for some centuries. And this is the backbone of what could be considered as my Magnum Opus, as my main work in the trilogy. The first two volumes of which were published by the University of Chicago Press under the title first over "The Wisdom of the World," and then "The Law of God," and whose third volume, as you've just been telling us a while ago, will see the light of day, if God will, this month of November, under the title of "The Kingdom of Man." My leading question is well, about the value, the possibility of a furtherance of, well, let's say the western cultural experiment.

Patrick Deneen  5:50  
On the subject of our present day predicament and very much connected to the question of the fate of Western culture, and this this experiment, you are, perhaps most recently have come into a great deal of public conversation as one of the signatories of the Paris Statement. This was a statement that has been critical of what what is called in that statement the false idea of Europe, a kind of false universalism, the result of what is in the statement is regarded as a defective understanding of Europe as an enlightenment project, abstract based upon a false conception of human nature, materialist, economistic, utilitarian understanding, and one which today imperils the European project through this false understanding. One question that arises from this is your own view toward Europe as a political entity? Is there a European political project that you think could be supported, that would actually prove supportive of a culture of Europe, or is in a sense the effort to combine the nations of Europe into some kind of a union, was that fated in some senses to become, to take the turn of being in some ways, ultimately destructive of the things that are at the core of Europe in your view?

Remi Brague  7:27  
Well, the problem is precisely the possible self defeating character of what's going on in the present day European institutions. This story was at the beginning, quite a success story. Because the leading intention of our founding fathers who by the way, were for the most part, committed Christians and even Catholics. Their main intention was moral in nature and not at all economic or political in nature. What they wanted after the dire experience of two wars, two world wars that began in Europe. What they wanted was to avoid the comeback of the causes that could bring about, that promotes, probably did bring about warfare between European nations, i.e. rivalry about the sources of economic growth, i.e. coal and steel, and at the very beginning of the European enterprise, of the enterprise of the European -- what is known as the European Union, which was originally European Community, which is not exactly the same thing, it was at the beginning, was the attempt at creating a common pool of coal resources and steel factories, let's say, so that there couldn't be any loophole for one more strife and one more, well most concrete warfare between nations. And while afterwards the project slowly developed and became something that the first Founding Fathers probably would have hated. I.e. the idea according to which European culture and a European cultural, political, sorry, European political unity is something that could simply do away with not only the differences between the countries, between the nations that have built a state in order to assert their identity. But this project would wipe out the very sources of European culture on behalf of some abstract kind of universality of, well a project vaguely lead and the flag of the human rights, whether it would simply say good riddance to, well, what constitutes European culture, i.e. the double reference to, to quote the common well phrase, Athens and Jerusalem, i.e. classical culture and Greek and Roman culture on the one hand, and on the other hand, the Bible which we have in common, we Christians with the Jews. Hence the common parlance of Judeo-Christian culture, against which I have some misgivings, you know, the hyphen, well, it's not always welcomed by everybody. And first of all, by the Jews who have, well, not exactly positive remembrances of their symbiosis with the Christians. 

Well be that as it may, what the Paris Statement, which you been alluding to a while ago, is against is precisely this attempt at forgetting, or at doing as if one could forget the presence and the secular in the chronological meaning of the term. The very long presence of those cultural sources in our European Culture. I prefer to speak, by the way, of sources rather than roots, you know, roots are a static image, you know, a tree can't move, sources flow and we have to go back to the source in order to fetch water. Whereas, if we are a tree and the roots of which are somewhere, we simply have to wait to wait for the sap to come up into the twigs that we are. And I prefer this active image of the sources as involving the necessity of an activity of an effort, you know, to get back to the source and to take advantage of them.

Patrick Deneen  11:30  
What strikes me about listening to you describe the situation in Europe is, in many ways, its similarity to what I think our dynamics today in the United States. In some ways, a division, quite similar between one side which in many ways seeks to preserve a tradition, a kind of culture, and another which regards that tradition and history and culture as something to be overcome, as something needing to be transcended, and envisioning a future world that that, in many ways, abandons or moves beyond some kind of historical or cultural inheritance.

From the standpoint of Europe, and maybe even more specifically from the standpoint of France, and thinking about a long history of a friendship between France and America that begins at the time of the American Revolutionary War. And we shouldn't also exclude from our conversation the relationship between France and the University of Notre Dame, founded by a religious order that originated from France. From the perspective of someone who's writing and thinking in this, let's say, more traditionalist, perhaps conservative in a, in a deep sense, certainly Catholic understanding, do you see the United States as in some ways a kind of partner in the effort to retrieve this tradition which we share, or in many ways as a kind of potentially a problem -- as undermining, as the kind of nation, as the nation that perhaps has been most notable and embracing a theory and a kind of ideology of progress? Where do you see the relationship between Europe broadly, France in particular, and the United States today?

Remi Brague  14:43  
Well, there is, indeed a likeness, common points between both sides of the ocean, and especially between France and the United States, but we should be wary of the symmetry, i.e. it's not self evident that bad things should come exclusively from the other side. Well I speak here from my French point of view. We more often than not foist the negative characteristics of modernity. I.e. some idolatry of progress on the American Experiment, but let's not forget to probe our own conscience, we French people. I'm sorry to have to confess that we exported to American campuses a great deal of highly suspicious intellectual wear. When I look at the cultural studies section of so many bookstores, well, I feel some sort of vicarious embarrassment by looking at the words, at the works, sorry, of some deconstructionists, so what you call here French theory, we don't call that French theory to be sure, we say, theory to go? Well, it might be the case that the poison, well is at to say the least shared, both sides are responsible. Well anyway, perhaps we should try to give a chance, a further chance to ideas like tradition and conservation provided provided we don't give a lopsided view of both you know, tradition more often than not is understood as past or as you say in English passe. It is something that has to be overcome, simply forgotten or sent to the dustbins of history. Whereas tradition in fact, is rather a dynamism that's an active process of transmitting. It's not never enough to sort of carry intellectual and cultural wears from the past to the present, we have to enrich them. You have to further them, we have to improve them we have, from time to time to correct them. 

And since you mentioned conservatism, let me tell you how I got conscious of my being conservative. I had to undergo some surgery some years ago. They had to remove approximately one foot of my bowels. And when I went to the surgeon after the operation, he told me, yes we had to remove, well say 30 centimeters of your bowels. I could have removed more, but I uphold a conservative conception of surgery. And what he meant thereby was well, what can, what is still healthy must remain and what is rotten must go. And well it's exactly what a conservative person has to do to sift, to weigh against each other what can still be useful and what has simply to be discarded. But we should not discard too much we should not keep too much. If something is rotten well it must simply go in order to give better more elbow room to what is still healthy. That's the program of, that I should call conservatism and of course, no longer in a derogatory, with a derogatory shade of meaning but as something quite, as quite a healthy move, a healthy method.

Patrick Deneen  19:16  
Professor Brague, you've, I think, painted a picture for us of a time of deep challenges faced both in Europe in France and the United States. The Paris Statement itself, at times paints a fairly bleak picture of our current time, a time of kind of dissipation of a cultural inheritance, description of a world governed today by an aimless materialism, the rise of a disconnected ruling class that seeks largely to avoid the rule of the people through a kind of form of administrative sovereignty and in response to the rise of increasingly populist movements and a deep form of political discontent that we see throughout the Western world today, both, on both sides of the pond. So I suppose in our, in the final minutes that we have together, let me ask you a question that perhaps will leave us with a little hope. Is there or do you see signs of health, perhaps in the sense of the part of the bowels that are still healthy, that can be conserved, is there is there sufficient health in France, in Europe, such that one can build back the health of the whole body, the body politic? Is there enough healthy parts of the body politic, that there might be the hope of a restoration? Or are we really in the midst of simply a long and foreseeable decline that we might be able to in some ways to slow but ultimately, like all human creations and all human beings, death awaits us.

Remi Brague  20:58  
There is an aspect of your question for which it would be apposite to apply to the nearest clairvoyant, as far as I'm concerned, and to stick to visual metaphors, well, I'm afraid my own spectacles, my own intellectual spectacles are rather gray colored, and I distrust my sort of my own pessimism, you know, that's a cost of mine. That's not an argument, something to do, perhaps, you know, with my digestion or perhaps my bad remembrances of my nursery period. Okay, a shrink would tell us a great deal of things about that. Okay, when I try to have a more objective, look on what's going on. Well, I can observe that not all signs of hope are absent and some are emphatically there. I'm thinking in particular, of the rise of a new generation of intellectuals in my own country, in my own French country, people who are eager to not only to learn not only to endeavor, better to understand the present situation, by shedding on it the light of philosophy, theology, political science and social sciences of all ilk. But they are people who want to intervene, to have their say in political life. And this is a phenomenon that I must confess, surprised me, surprised me that run counter what I described a while ago as some sort of ingrained pessimism. And while I'm very happy to have been wrong, and I hope that those seeds will grow and flourish in the future, among while young philosophers, young politicians, young social scientists, and so on and so forth. This exists, this is a reality and well, as an old man, I'm 70 now I welcome this new generation with great hope. To be sure, as an intellectual, I have a certain tendency to look at reality, well, from the vantage point of an intellectual, i.e. perhaps to over emphasize the importance of intellectual pursuits. Well, that's normal, you know, it's my job sort of. But as far as the French intelligentsia to, this is a name to call it by, is concerned, there are emphatically positive elements, emphatically positive signs of some sort of renewal, deepening of reflection and okay, I can condone all that and wait for, for more, please give more of that.

Patrick Deneen  24:25  
Speaking as the acting director just this past semester, of the Center for Ethics and Culture, I can also say that this has been emphatically my experience during my time being part of this institution and encountering such wonderful, extremely hope giving students that you also I think, had the opportunity to speak with today. So on behalf of the Center for Ethics and Culture, thank you for spending these days with us and thank you for spending this time with us on this podcast today.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  24:58  
Thank you to Professors Deneen and Brague for the fascinating conversation. You can learn more about the Center's book series Catholic Ideas for a Secular World in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast, which is released every other Thursday during the academic year by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please give us a review on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu. Our theme music is "I Dunno" by grapes, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We'll see you next time on Ethics and Culture Cast. Until then, make good decisions.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai