Abstract
In my opening lecture, drawing on a historical retrospective, I sought to distinguish between two groups of European intellectuals: on the one hand, the “men of good conscience,” and on the other, “that species that complains” (P. Valéry). With all the caveats inherent in this kind of rough classification, I would suggest placing men of science under the heading “men of good conscience,” and intellectuals with a more literary and hermeneutic orientation—men of letters—under the heading “the species that complains.” The history of good conscience begins in the seventeenth century, at a time when science in the new sense of the term—the “new mechanical philosophy”—found its institutional foothold in the major European academies. The causes of this birth are not merely cognitive in nature; they are also social and political: if political authorities supported and encouraged the new science, it was also because the latter had made it its program to distance itself from politics and to abandon any normative purpose. Consequently, the scientist as an individual is relieved of all responsibility for the consequences of his practice, and science as such is thereby exonerated. The “provisional morality” outlined by Descartes in his *Discourse on the Method* becomes the absolute standard of conduct for the scientist.
In contrast are the intellectuals who, to borrow Paul Valéry’s phrase, consider themselves members of the “complaining species” and who cultivate their unease with the world in the form of a melancholic attitude that quickly takes on the traits of a professional deformation. The intellectual, in his dissatisfaction, finds refuge in utopia. The tension between melancholy and utopia shapes the “politics of the mind”—another key term coined by Paul Valéry—of European intellectuals to the same degree as the tensions (which take specific forms depending on the different European countries) between scientists and men of letters.
