What is the admiration we show before things, nature, human actions or works of art?A genealogy -shaped response.
We admire a painting, we have admiration for a person who acted for the good of all, we admire a landscape ... Sometimes even, we admire ourselves, probably out of pride, when the selfie does not get involved.But what do we mean there?What does this admiration mean?How does she engage us vis-à-vis a work, a landscape or morality and history?
And even if we neglect for the moment the history of the establishment of the concept, everyone feels that it is not easy use.How and what to distinguish astonishment, surprise, stupor, suspension in front of the world or the work of art, as well as the esteem of something?You have to tackle these terms to make your place in admiration.If, historically, it is important to understand how admiration constitutes the adequate modality to relate to the measures of a new world, at least of a newly watched world (from "great discoveries"), it is allAssus important to identify our admiring availability today, and to give shape to an admiration that some still consider it too often passive.
Precisely, among the thousand and one means by which the secular and modern world installed man, in terms of nature and his own examination, at the heart of his productions, his thought and his expectations, this "passion», Admiration was decisive.Admittedly, the notion, through the ancient conception of astonishment (Thaumazein), has long been around.She defines the first moment of the desire to know: to be surprised first (from what we see, what we hear), then question to find out to find out.But its translation into Latin, admiring, accompanies a reduction in its use and a displacement of its interest, now subject to the arcane of theology.We must wait for the Cartesian promotion of admiration to find it at the center of the interest of philosophers.Besides, René Descartes, we will see, is not the only one on the list of philosophers to give him growing importance.
This is all that the work of Thibault Barrier Explore.Philosopher, teacher at the University of Tours, he designed a research which constitutes a real historical-theoretical journey.It happens to the conclusion that the modern promotion of admiration structures the major upheaval of philosophical anthropology of the classical age.
The transformation of the concept
Obviously, the stories of philosophy as the commentators of the contemporary world neglect this notion of admiration.If it is used, it is not analyzed in its composition and its content.Even current writings on emotions and aesthetic feelings, which are numerous, neglect it.They cite her for memory, barely.This is what the work presented here does not pass here.
1649 is the precise date around which pivots the transformation of the notion of admiration, now defining it as an intense movement of the soul, an affect which modifies the soul and the body.This is the date of publication of the passions of the soul of Descartes.Of course, the author identifies previous writings and around this treaty (those of Etienne Chauvin, for example), the fact remains that is the moment when admiration becomes a philosophical object anda cultural theme concerning science, arts and politics.With the end of the reference to the works of Thomas Aquinas, the erasure of a God who has become unknowable, emerge from the work of restructuring thought.Those we cite are part of it.If Thomas Aquinas makes admiration a contemplation mixed with fear and respect for the incomprehensible greatness of divine omnipotence, now it becomes a notion in its own right.It is integrated into the new passions system, as the first of them.It can no longer be considered derived from other passions (the desire to know, the fear, the esteem of a greatness or the love of God), it becomes an object of autonomous knowledge, and takes a determining meaningFor understanding human action.
It finally takes place at the heart of a classic age which is primarily interested in the way in which affects arise in individual life, then their repercussions in social and political life.Admiration is part of this system and constitutes the passion for the very emergence of an external thing, encountered for the first time, from which other passions arise.
Objects, nature and use of admiration
Thibault Barrier's work investigates the conceptual future of the notion of admiration.But, once again, the results of the survey cannot leave us indifferent to our own uses.By delimiting the border between classical admiration and the preceding biases (Greeks or medieval), it gives admiration a meaning which remains partly ours.It is therefore not a reduced elucidation to its historic share.
Note however that, given the brevity imposed by a simple report, we ignore many developments present in the work, including a good examination of the Petrarch letter following its ascent of Mont Ventoux (andThe function of admiration still medieval), another important examination on the function of admiration at Balthasar Gracian, Montaigne also, Port-Royal, etc..Too bad, but the interested reader will easily find these passages in the work by grasping their function all the better in the genesis of the modern concept of admiration.
It is nevertheless important to understand that from the Renaissance a double displacement affects the status of admiration.Now it presents itself as a provision anchored in the knowledge of a nature in the hidden God, which has become infinite variation of forms, and as a full -fledged passion.As for her, therefore, and this precise moment of a passionate shock caused by the meeting of our body with an external body, its promotion as a fundamental provision with regard to the world obviously engages a temporality (the moment of the meeting), but also a reciprocal relationship between time and admiration (it transforms depending on whether it relates to a past object or a future object), finally it engages a third dimension which, in addition to the primary discontinuity (the confrontation withthe object), opens on a new temporal continuity.These constituent elements of this particular relationship that is admiration imply a difference between two conceptions of admiration, either it immobilizes the mind, or it puts it in motion.
And it is from this land thus cleared that Descartes establishes admiration as the first of passions.Not that this philosopher then solves all the problems posed, but he succeeds in a brilliant synthesis from the conditions offered to him.
Admiration according to Descartes
The Cartesian theory of admiration has a certain radicality which, moreover, has long marked its successors.The author of this work does not stop his investigation to this philosopher.He settled in this thought in order to better cross and then explain the work of Malebranche, then Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, especially.This succession in the same sentence should not suggest that admiration undergoes only one and the same treatment from one to the other of these philosophers.On the contrary.If in one, Descartes and partly Malebranche, admiration can define a sudden surprise of the soul and enter into the framework of the six primitive passions (admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness), in Hobbes,She is part of a necessary distinction between admiration, superstition and religion, while in Spinoza, she returns as part of a reflection on superstition, and gives rise to the description of the theater of theadmiration, taken between the usurpation of power and enslavement.
Descartes therefore, in the passions of the soul, studies not only the definition of admiration, but also the physiological movements linked to it and its use.And as she is first, the first of the passions, other passions derive from it.When the new object she meets is a greatness, she becomes estimated.When this esteem relates to ourselves and it is fair, it becomes magnanimity, and when it is unfair, pride.When the new object is a smallness, admiration becomes contempt this time, which, itself, when it relates to ourselves and it is fair, is just called humility, and baseness when it isunfair.Finally, when esteem or contempt no longer relate to ourselves but to another cause, admiration becomes respectively veneration or disdain.
We will admire, if we can say, not only the study that Thibault Barrier in fact, but the subtlety of Cartesian sequences, which we often neglect.Subtlety which constitutes an internal culmination of Cartesian thought, since the latter must struggle first with the orientation of admiration towards miracles or magic knowledge before which many are still taken, towards the phenomena whose causes we do not know.An admiration which is therefore a deception based on ignorance.But everything changed in 1649.
The primacy of admiration then stems from the fact that the surprise and the judgment are carried out below any consideration on the usefulness or the convenience of the thing with regard to the subject.Admiration therefore becomes a passion, but the first of all, a condition for the appearance of things outside the soul, and structure of the relationship with the world.The surprise is constitutive.The soul is prompted prompt and suddenly by something.She comes out of her routine movement.She is struck by objects that seem rare and extraordinary to her.It carries the soul to consider the object with attention.Passion and attention are joined (what can be compared with all the recent theories of the lost attention of the young generations).It has the body to become an area available for the inscription of other passionate body signs, since it is a zero degree of expressive movement.It also becomes, for example, astonishment when the strength of surprise is such that brain printing increases.
But the Cartesian theorization of admiration does not stop there, to its usefulness for knowledge.She is also interested in admiration in the context of emotional life.In this other sphere of human actions, admiration joins generosity and virtuous humility, considered as just forms of admiration.And we know how decisive generosity is for Cartesian ethics.Admiration therefore becomes, in this register, the instrument of a voluntary determination by which the soul fulfills its moral dimension.
Admiration resumed
Hobbes moves the perspective opened by Descartes.But it is also that, like Spinoza, the question of desire is taken differently by these two authors.With Hobbes the admiration is part of a pathology.Curiosity for example, linked to admiration, now passes for a desiring dimension.Admiration can therefore be defined as hope and expectation of future knowledge.She is charged with a temporal dimension which makes her tend towards the future.Admiring one thing is not only to be struck by its novelty is still hoping and waiting to be able to know it.Admiration is the hope of a future increase in knowledge.It also takes the form of an appetite which brings together a pleasant object.But it is not a disinterested passion.It is based on the pleasures of the mind.So it is the fundamental movement that is the desire or the effort to persevere in being.It is an orientation of desire.
This resumption of admiration and its entry into a new argumentation carries Hobbes to widen the field of admiration of admiration.For example to the theory of religion, of which he tries to develop the "natural" genesis (from passions).Can we not affirm that religious attitude, like the very idea of God, derive from a tendency to admire natural phenomena attached to the feeling of our own weakness?Then come other considerations that Barrier develops abundantly.
But a final set of reflection makes it possible to introduce Spinoza's philosophy in this context of "time of admiration".The spinozist design of admiration is not only in rupture with Cartesian definition.She moves the admiration of the register of passions, articulated only to the three affects: joy, sadness, desire.Admiration is no longer counted only as a singular imagination of the mind riveted to a fixed idea.Spinoza refuses to give admiration a decisive utility in knowledge.It connects admiration to imagination, distraction, but also to the suspension of the mind and the amazement.It is all the power to think and act that is taken into account here.Doesn't admiration tend to put the mind in a standstill?We can clearly see how to joint here ignorance and theory of religion as well as monarchical politics.Admiration has become an affection and an imagination that occupies the spirit alone.Spinoza castigates the human tendency to want to admire and be admired, especially since it is in no way an incentive to know things, but presents itself rather as an impediment to chain true ideas.It limits the mind to the first kind of knowledge, by opinion.
To finish this too brief report of an extremely excavated work, as the survey, such as concepts analyzes, are not so far from our contemporary concerns should be noted..For example, questions of the relationship to art work, but also questions of attention, those of surprise and aesthetic life.
