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In your memoirs you suggest that, when you saw certain behaviors, you stopped believing in the goodness of the human species.
Not so much. What I say is that I couldn't believe in Rousseau's noble savage
And I think I must stick to it
Human beings are predatory animals, capable of everything
of creating Bach's music and of performing the greatest massacres and injustices
We are all like that
If we are not, to put it some way, evil
it's because we are educated not to be, because we try not to be
it's the title of a song by Boris Vian, "I haven't come to this world to kill anybody"
It's a pretty good principle
Rousseau's noble savage is inside the philosophy of Enlightenment
which is brutally individualistic and, above all, not historical
Rousseau has no idea how primitive societies were, how our historical ancestors were
We are lucky to know “fossil” societies which have remained until now or, at least, until the seventies
People who lived in similar conditions to those of our distant ancestors
We know how they lived and it wasn't precisely in a society of noble savages
They were societies were sometimes conflicts were ritualized, but they were conflictive societies
The individual's innate goodness is...
Is there a concept of human nature behind the idea of Law?
The Naturalistic thought I've been fighting my whole life
I had to suffer it as a student
And it reappears again and again in its formalistic version
For example, Adela Cortina
She allows herself to write articles with a Kantian Naturalistic view as if nothing had happened
As if what's just and unjust, what's good and evil, what law is, what obedience to law is, was clear
She doesn't question any of it
It's a kind of thinking that doesn't realize the lack of foundation of our cultural beliefs
Our cultural beliefs are not based on anything solid
They're not based on any Kantian principle, in any Platonic, abstract principle
in any general principle that says “you must do this and not that”
No, they are historical conventions which have become more and more established
and, in certain sense, we could say that for good
as long as we don't think about all the atrocities committed during the 20th century
and which are starting to happen in the 21st
Our culture is conventional, historical. sociohistorical
There is no naturalism
Underneath it all, behind it all, there's nothing natural we may aspired to go back to
nothing which may inspire us
I deeply believe in the lack of foundation of everything
and in the historical conventionality of the different cultures
There are millions of Chinese people who don't believe in God
The idea of God doesn't inspire them at all
unlike what's happened in western societies
not to mention the North-American puritans
Why? It's a convention that has been formed historically
linked to solving everyday life problems, without going through many metaphysics
We have followed that trend from the Catholic Kings on
All the European monarchs have tried to make religion a state matter