POLITIQUE, INTERPRÉTATION ET
CRÉATION
Mario Ionuț Maroşan
Doctorant en philosophie politique
Faculté de philosophie de l’Université
Laval
Le prince [le politicien] doit «
apprendre comment ne pas être
bon ».
Niccolò Machiavelli, Le Prince,
chap. XV (1513).
When Machiavelli wrote that, he
gave powerful articulation to an
idea that has become
commonplace, namely that we
cannot practice politics without
‘‘dirtying our hands.’’ To attempt
otherwise is to court disaster – for
oneself, of course, but also for
Scénario de la bombe à retardement : Les agents du service canadien du
renseignement de sécurité capturent un terroriste possédant des informations sur plusieurs bombes cachées qui vont bientôt exploser dans plusieurs grandes villes
canadiennes et blesser, voire tuer, un grand nombre d’individus. Quoi faire alors ? Faut-il autoriser la torture afin d’obtenir les
informations permettant de désamorcer les bombes ? Or, pour beaucoup de Canadiens la torture constitue une voie erronée. Pour d’autres, la responsabilité de protection
envers les potentielles victimes innocentes constitue un argument qui pèse davantage dans la balance. Que faut-il faire ? Va-t-on avoir les mains sales ou propres en fin de compte ?
πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα
(Archiloque, VIIe siècle avant J.-C.)
Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum
magnum (Érasme, 1500)
The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog
one, but it’s a big one.
Il sait bien des tours le renard. Le hérisson
n’en connaît qu’un, mais il est fameux.
Le renard connaît beaucoup de choses,
tandis que le hérisson n’est connait qu’une
grande.
For there exists a great chasm between those, on the one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organizing
principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, […] related by no moral or
aesthetic principle ; […] their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing […] unitary inner vision. The first
kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second the foxes; and
without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius,
Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs;
Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
1. Approche moniste des
hérissions, qu’on pourrait
qualifier de théorique.
Those sceptical about talk of
inescapable dirty hands are all
monists. To the orthodox among
them, the unity of the practical
world, the fact that all values
ultimately fit together, means that
there always exists a clean solution
to every dilemma. To the
unorthodox, there may be times
when, the world being what it is, we
are unable to avoid dirtying our
hands; but the world can — at least
in principle — be changed, indeed
unified, thereby eliminating the
2. Approche pluraliste
des renards, qu’on
pourrait qualifier de
athéorique.
Pluralists take the opposite
position : to them, the
fragmentation of practical
reality means that all
genuine conflicts are, and
always will be,
irreconcilable, so the best
we can do when faced with
one is to strike a
compromise, to reach an
accommodation that will be
more or less dirty.
We also have those who,
paradoxically, combine both
pluralism and monism. To the
“pluramonists,” while it’s often
possible to take a unified and
so clean approach, there will
be times, indeed a plurality of
them, when exceptions must
be made and so our hands
unavoidably get dirtied.
3. Approche paradoxale
de ceux qui affirment
simultanément le
pluralisme et le
monisme, c’est pourquoi
on pourrait les qualifier
(le vide)
4. Approche nihiliste.
We also have the (often
overlooked) nihilists, for whom we
should be upholding neither the
One, nor the Many, nor a
paradoxical combination of the
two; rather, what we should
recognize is none other than the
None. When we do we will see
that, given the reality of moral
void, anything goes, and that is
why there is no need to worry
about dirty hands.
5. Approche
herméneutique,
entre pluralisme et
monisme.
Disons que je me réveille un matin et que je réalise que j'ai deux tâches à accomplir : finaliser un article que j'ai accepté de soumettre pour publication (il est déjà tard, aucune prolongation n'est possible) et tenir une promesse vis-à-vis du fait d’aider un ami à déménager dans un nouvel appartement. Il me semble que quatre options se présentent à moi. Je peux aller chez mon ami tout de suite et passer la journée à l'aider à déménager, bien que cela ne me laisse pas le temps de terminer l'article. Je peux partir vers midi et passer la moitié du temps disponible avec mon ami et la moitié avec l'article – ni l'un ni l'autre n'obtiendraient leur dû, mais ni l'un ni l'autre ne seraient totalement négligés non plus. Je pourrais aussi aller voir mon ami le soir après avoir travaillé toute la journée sur l’article – mon amitié risque de se finir là. Je peux aussi l’ignorer et ne pas terminer l’article. Notez qu'une dynamique à somme nulle semble ici incontournable, du moins dans les trois premières options : plus je passe de temps sur l'article, moins j'en ai pour mon ami et vice versa.
5. Approche
herméneutique,
entre pluralisme et
monisme.
So the problem is not only with monist theorists who fail to appreciate how enfeebling it is to enshrine values in abstract, hence brittle, principles in order to avoid the slippery slope. Pluralists also fail to realise that, in aiming to do no more than avoiding sliding down that slope, they ensure that our lives will often end up dirtier than they have to be. What could be more dispiriting? We can say the same of the pluramonists, who combine both of these weaknesses in their too-quick appeal to what appears to be no more than irrational creativity (for how else are we to arrive at the plural exceptions to unity?). And that the nihilists demoralize will surprise no one, not least themselves. In consequence, what’s needed instead of these and related approaches is a hermeneutical approach (between pluralism and monism), a synergistic ambition, one that strives for reconciliatory solutions. There is no guarantee of success, it is true. But we guarantee failure if we never try.
