The Anti-Modernity of the French Philosopher Jean Brun

The article examines the French philosopher Jean Brun’s perception of the contemporary world, by analyzing the three pivotal components of Brun’s work, i.e., technology, language and sacredness. Modern people’s desperate attempts to escape their tragic destiny by trying to conceal the sacred lull human beings into an illusion of becoming creators of a technology-ruled space. In an attempt to escape the web of metaphysical anxiety associated with regrets, ontological Absence and separation, modern people hope to shelter behind the shield of materialism, horizontality and relativism. The article shows that, according to Jean Brun, technology and science are nothing but a veil, a painted veil with a sophisticated image of human deifica-tion. In an attempt at self-transformation, human beings, enslaved by technology, become the measure of all things. In their pursuit of absolute and ultimate knowledge, people focus their self-transformation on being rather than on cognition. Technology nurtured by excessive knowledge inevitably provokes alienation and robs humankind of humanistic, philosophical and religious sense. Finding themselves in an artificial, virtual reality where consumption and greed prevail, people easily reject objective reality. The instrumentalization of language enables standards and programs to plan all human activity. However, asking the question “Who am I?” instead of “What am I?”, human beings can cease seeing themselves in the center of the universe, can stop the process of alienation, can assess the world’s reality and the appeal of Everything Else.


Introduction
According to Maurice Blondel, "philosophy is necessary in order to establish that it is not self-sufficient" (as cited in: [Désilets 1951, 52]; see also: [Blondel 1893;Blondel 1937;Brun 1988, 317 ff.]), and Jean Brun emphasized the relevance of these "wise words" by adding that many philosophers "fabricate a philosophical object that they then choose to describe and analyze, thus taking, in the words of Leibnitz, the straw of words for the grain of things" 1 (as cited in: [Canguilhem 1996, 5]).
The French philosopher and scholar Jean Brun did not belong to any particular school, practicing independent philosophical judgment. His prolific work, rich in concepts, is characterized by an intelligent and profound critique of modernity. In this respect, we can note that his writings join those of other authors who also did not affiliate with any philosophical school or movement, which emphasized the predominant place of technology and materialism as central in the project of modernity [Brun 1992]. Jean Brun specialized in ancient thinkers (Aristotle, Pre-Socratics, Plato, Stoicists, etc.), to whom he devoted many works, and in general history of philosophy, mostly European [Brun 1988]. He was also greatly interested in explaining Pascal's thought, according to which, "Nothing is so insupportable to man as to be completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness… At once, from the depth of his soul, will arise weariness, gloom, sadness, vexation, disappointment, despair" [Pascal 1901, 41]. In the current paper, we have to limit ourselves to three objects of his thinking: technology, language and the sacred.

Jean Brun's tragic representation of existence
Speaking about Jean Brun's contribution to philosophy, Georges Canguilhem wonders whether the statement that "since Revelation can never be achieved through human power, the human quest for Revelation is vain" is an issue worthy of a philosopher's attention. The philosopher adds that "Jean Brun's works are devoted to developing the issue" [Canguilhem 1996, 5]. In his works, Jean Brun criticizes the rationality of Enlightenment and consequently the rationality of technicism induced by modernity, which renounces the sacred and instigates humans to pursue technological improvement and to never cease trying to avoid separation. It is an ardent though futile search for a technical solution to achieve autonomy, deemed as beneficial. Denis Moulin [Moulin 2005, 26] maintains that, according to Jean Brun, philosophy should engage in "demythologization of myth creators rather than of myths as such." "Philosophy will really fulfill its demystifying function by showing that whatever a human being says, he cannot liberate himself from the Sacred" [Brun 1979a, 89].
Not unlike Søren Kierkegaard, whose works he has ardently studied 2 , Jean Brun is well aware of modern people's inability to change their condition, for they fail to rely on anything but their own strength and on the chimeras they themselves have created. Throughout different stages of his reflection, the French philosopher maintains that human beings find themselves "in a tragic conflict both with themselves and with their own works" [Brun 2013, 27]. It is profoundly logical that Jean Brun takes a sincere interest in Pascal's and Kierkegaard's works and in their thoughts concerning the tragic representation of existence, for we "pass from Pascal's terror to Kierkegaard's anguish" [Moulin 2005, 27], facing "empty conceptual labyrinths of the Minotaur and Theseus" [Brun 2013].
For Jean Brun, the main task of philosophy "consists in demystifying the 'solutions' and 'answers' that prove invalid by being unable to go beyond the horizons where they keep failing" [Brun 1981, 4]. The world wants to be abused and deceived (mundus vult decipi), it delights in deception and illusion. To this self-inflicted myopia, Jean Brun also adds utopia and uchronia, for human beings endowed with history do not stop their attempts to "replace the garden of Eden (for which they crave nostalgia) with an earthly paradise that can be gained through science and technology" [Brun 1979a, 3]. It is a process of one's self-divinization which is accomplished through gaining perfect knowledge that endows history and science with creative potential to liberate one from one's original state; or even better to make a human being the measure of all things. To dispel the lie, Jean Brun develops a critical philosophy aimed at highlighting the crisis experienced by human beings through triumphalism and illusory deification. According to Jean Brun, to demystify the lost paradise is to strip it of "any possibility of horizontality, to regain its vertical dimension, its transhistorical and metadialectic perspective" [Brun 1979a, 20].

Human beings deprived of their inner world
Jean Brun is a philosopher who observes the ontological immanence of modernity camouflaging with technical means the emptiness of human existence where there is no longer search for Absence. "Technology for technology's sake has invaded our daily life. But it triumphs even more deeply in inconspicuous spheres, especially in philosophical speculation. Having achieved its climax, the dialectics of unveiling and surmounting has reduced existence to a primitive game with a veil that conceals nothing" [Brun 1981, 4]. Man systematizes the use of technical progress to flee from existence in a pointless search of interpretations which have become instruments of dizziness and alienation [Dagognet 1996]. Jean Baudrillard points out that "the spectacle of a machine with thinking potential robs man of his thinking ability". As well as Jean Brun, Jean Baudrillard dwells on people's systematic disregard for their own fate in favor of objects and machines. He writes in his work that "the meaning of objects is not confined to their material value and practical function. Their expansion in accordance with the aims of production, the incoherent rush to flood the world with material objects, the blind submission to ever-changing whims of fashion: all these apparently cannot prevent us from realizing that objects have significance that is assigned to them in the consumption-centered society. This is the logic and the strategy of such object-centered systems characterized by intricate relations between psychological investments and social imperatives of prestige, between projective mechanisms and a complex game of product brands and models" [Baudrillard 1968, cover].
Jean Brun smiles at people's futile and listless attempts to extricate themselves from their condition through constant devotion to technology. He underlines that humanity faces a crisis associated with severe problems and hardships, "humanity is confronted with violence and rejection engendered by its hyper-development. Obstinate in their desire to become godlike, human beings wage a war against themselves, unable to choose between the thrall of dictatorship and nihilistic permissiveness" [Brun 1981, 4]. The growing role of technology and its prevalence in numerous areas of modern life have a perverse effect of threatening man's freedom and, therefore, should be controlled. The totalitarian conception of the relation of progress to knowledge and power implies, therefore, that progress which is expected to enable people to cast off their nature and get released from their condition, in fact condemns them to the misery of "being tragically confronted with themselves and their products" [Brun 2013, 27].
Technicism leads to total overreliance, overconfidence in technology, to technological hybris stemming from a Promethean attempt at total instrumentalization of the world and the triumph of the one-dimensional reality. The strictly utilitarian nature of technology is permeated with the Faustian frenzy and its devastating myths. Tracing the development of Søren Kierkegaard's thought, Jean Brun contraposes Hegel's attachment to supremacy of collective interests over the individual. However, majority rule -the rule of the crowd, the rule of the world -forfeits one's relationship with God. According to Hegel, community interests prevail over individual interests, law prevails over exception, and a community prevails over its individual member.

Devastation of nature or its transformation
Jean Brun believes that a technological mind has a capacity to pursue "ontological change in which human beings seek a transformation for themselves" [Brun 1961, 121], a transformation that may trigger off "a creative frenzy, a Faustian delusion, a shattering collapse of civilization infatuated with the pseudo triumph of technology" [Dagognet 1996, 7]. Technology ensures the reign of illusion and circumvention. The real world gets obscured by schizophrenic images which blur the reality, overshadowing the real future.
As the author of the book The Evil (Le Mal) puts it, the transformation is a long process which has several stages. The first stage constituting this intellectual process is the Copernican revolution inspired by René Descartes' Discourse on the Method and the I-think-therefore-I-am principle. Another stage is associated with Emmanuel Kant's profound statement: "Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects […] Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that objects must conform to our cognition" [Kant 1998, 110]. This is the turning point which serves as a basis for transcendental idealism and empirical realism of Kant's philosophy. It is a transition from the Aristotelian and Thomistic approach, which proceeds from being to knowledge, from existence to essence, to the approach of Descartes and Kant. Jean Brun writes that knowledge "is no longer based on reality but on the understanding that organizes knowledge. From now on, being exceeds what we know about it…" [Brun 2013, 89]. This is a definition that defines "cognition". Objects must conform to our cognition and not otherwise. As far as evil is concerned, the obvious consequence of this modern revolution is that the choice of evil is in fact ignorance of the good, which equates fault with error, thus a sinner becomes ignorant. The French scholar refers to an idea expressed in the Discourse on the Method which states that human beings are "able to save themselves by their work" and that in the end they are free "to do good or to do evil." Literally that is to say that people are shaped by their decisions and deeds and not by the objective reality surrounding them, as is believed on classical philosophy. It demonstrates the intrinsic greatness of man, even when erring, for man is granted freedom and autonomy. Descartes writes that "in making us masters of ourselves, it [our free will] renders us godlike in a way" [Descartes 1989, 103]. This "anticlerical humanism" is based on a "liberating rationalism" [Brun 1988, 153] whose role is to substantiate and transform the reality that has been previ-ously experienced and is immune to people's influence and natural law into a reality procreated by human thought and human cognition. Human nature, which, according to rationalists, changes under the influence of time and environment, is opposed to the Renaissance concept of plural worlds, the concept of a multifaceted mirror. Cognition is to serve what Nicholas of Cusa calls an attempt to achieve the "coincidence of opposites." Being a talented historian of philosophy, J. Brun pursues the study of evolution by focusing on Baruch Spinoza, who believes that the real world, i.e., Nature, is completed with the presence of a being of reason, an Entity, a Supreme Being "that transfers all the power that he possesses to the community [emphasis added], which will therefore alone [emphasis added] retain the sovereign natural right over everything, that is, the supreme rule which everyone will have to obey either of free choice or through fear of the ultimate penalty" [Spinoza 1991, 241]. "God has no special kingdom over men except through the medium of temporal rulers" [Spinoza 1991, 280]. Jean Brun speaks about a transfer of reason to the State which has become the Reason and has gained the power to establish ethics and determine what is right and good.
The finality of evolution is characterized by infernality of logic, deification of human beings (according to Auguste Comte), and radical secularization of "Comtian sociodicea and sociocracy" (according to Émile Durkheim). The latter maintains that sociologism eradicates morality in favor of the science of morals, defining collective imperatives according to behaviors of the majority of social beings; the notion of progress obviously being responsible for changing these categorical sociological imperatives. The plurality of conceptions and the resulting relativism enable Nietzsche, Freud and Marx to abandon attempts at objectively assessing Evil.
Famous for his masterful use of language, Jean Brun completes modern philosophers' reasoning by making the following assumption: since man is the measure of all things, and people's knowledge defines what is Evil, therefore, we proceed from knowing to being, "for there is no evil but the evil that has been elicited through intellectual assumptions, that has been unveiled" [Brun 2013, 97].
Structuralism can be considered the ultimate epigone of this dialectic, for a human being is a material structure, for "knowledge, being caused by knowledge, is an object, and man" [Brun 2013, 100] is just a constituting element. The essence of this dialectic is that absolute, immanent Knowledge nourishes itself, innocently shapes itself in time and through time by means of the philosophy of history, which is intimately linked to the notion of progress, has the potential of finding in itself the highest happiness by giving free rein to its passions and making itself the consumer of its only desire.
Jean Brun believes that technology and technological devices cause dizziness and alienation, depleting human, philosophical and religious meaning. Like Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Ellul 3 , Jean Brun develops the idea that our modern universe attenuates transcendental ontology, reduces the validity of the very definition of objective reality, since artifacts and virtual representations of the world deplete referents based on notions of meaning and truth. The drawback of positivism when compared with metaphysics is that it serves to conceal what horizontality cannot produce. "Positivism, sociologism, Marxism, structuralism and psychoanalysis are the most neglected aspects of nihilism" [Brun 1979b, 68].
Jean Brun as a researcher of Søren Kierkegaard's philosophical works, says that he has seen politicians who "treat men as means to an end, pretending to be 'chosen' and capable of bringing the heavenly Jerusalem down to earth. Their failures provoke resentment and create an illusion of power, while in fact people they support have to face much graver problems, since instead of gaining their freedom, they lose it. Moreover, the sacrifice is made in the name of Freedom and men lose their lives so that Man could live" [Brun 1980, xviii].

Language and ontological separation
Conscious of the constitutive separation which predetermines the finitude of consciousness, man wishes to transcend this ontological separation by using science and technology to strive for a final victory over such separation, searching for "knowledge and tools (technological) to efficiently overcome challenges. These actions are aimed at self-liberation" [Brun 1992, 16]. Human beings are obsessed with the desire to "penetrate into the mystery of their origin" [Brun 1961, 172], to learn who they are and how to go back to Absence. Human beings try to go beyond their condition of existent, to get ontologically separated. According to Bertrand Rickenbacher, Brun tries hard to elucidate various forms taken by these chimeras by studying "many of these attempts to overcome it and… devotes himself to the analysis of humans' failed attempts to identify themselves" [Rickenbacher 1997, 5].
The quest for the meaning of life, for people's tragic destiny, is summarized by Jean Brun in the following way: the main thing is to know if "the experience of [ontological] separation implies a kind of fundamental ontological structure, or if, on the contrary, it is an exorcism that will entice a human being to work" [Brun 1961, 7].
In spite of the abyss between the created and Everything-Else, there is a dialectic of tension between them: "The tragic is the test that implies, in each of our thoughts […] the synthesis of the finite and the infinite" [Brun 1988, 286], which leads J.-J. Wunenberger to describe Jean Brun's philosophical research as "an echo of Pascal's anguish, Kierkegaard's paradoxes and Nietsche's 'hammer blows'" [Wunenberger 1987, 181]. Jean Brun's thought is a philosophical reflection on being and knowledge. It addresses the whole reality of a human being, who is, as an only reasonable being in the world, capable of speech. Language comes to humans from the "eternal foundation of this Condition that constitutes it" [Brun 1985, 20] and is not created by humans. In the course of human history, language gives multiple answers to the question "What am I?" The answers make the question itself inaudible. Instead of understanding people and their knowledge in the unity and totality of life and thought, which constitute their being and are realized in and through language, theorists of knowledge treat a human being as an isolated intelligence placed in front of the world, from which it remains essentially separated.
Linguists, with their operative manipulations, "their ideologies of confinement […], the Prometheanisms of their science, technology and method, those who do not accept that they do only part of the job… refuse to treat language as anything else but a tool to solve tasks" [Brun 1985, 147]. Emilienne Naert states that Jean Brun's work People and Language (L'homme et le langage) will not leave indifferent all those interested in the history of philosophy. Naert highlights Brun's unique approach to philosophical ideas from those expressed in "Plato's Cratylus and Aristotelian On Interpretation to those characteristic of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy and structuralisms, with due consideration of the problem of universals, Port-Royal logic, Locke and Leibnitz's views. A new interpretation of Mallarmé's and Valéry's works by Jean Brun [gives] a philosophical approach to poetic experience, and the pages [of his book People and Language] on the paths of the symbol in psychoanalysis, magic and chemistry are not the least original" [Naert 1985, 451].
According to Brun, this odyssey of language can help understand how a modern man is treated in French philosophy: "endangered languages, prevailing languages, the language of scientists searching for wisdom, the language of technologists, the language of machine translation, the poetic language of zaum [beyond-sense of Russian Futurists], the language of Dadaism, the language of lettrism, the language of slogans, the language of acronyms, the language of pictograms, the language of logic, languages of electronic communication are all language tombs created by people in a futile attempt to master the Sense only to be buried there" [Brun 1985, 65].
Human beings, speaking creatures, have an inclination to evil and cannot but reveal their natural inclination to evil through communication [Kopper 1996]. Jean Brun maintains that Evil appeared at the moment of Creation and "initiated human history at that very moment when people discarded the path of Sacred Sense and started using language for acquisition of knowledge" [Brun 1985, 129]. The question "What am I?" is not just a question, it is the question by which language expresses itself in its inclination to evil. "The degradation of language provokes the question 'What am I?' and enables one to respond" [Brun 1985, 10]. The question "What am I?" does not presuppose that man should be treated as a being searching for an answer through this question addressed both to himself and the world. This question underlines human inclination to evil and a human being only exists in the question and through it. The question, which can never be answered, is characterized by two fundamental characteristics: its universal character, its definitive self-affirmation and its tendency to domination of the world. Through this question, man aspires to subjugate himself and the world to an inalterable universal order. That is why human beings, who understand their essence through this question, dedicating themselves to it, find themselves in a world where everything is preordained, where neither material things nor people are granted freedom, where programs and rules govern everything." Thus, for Jean Brun, language is nothing more than this instrument that "is used by human beings to program themselves, their ideas, their feelings, their woks and their actions [Kopper 1996]." The task of this concealed wisdom is "to incorporate men into a Great social Being of the State which will program them and make them function within the framework of intricately connected historical, political and scientific norms" [Brun 1985, 247-248].

Secularization and faith
According to Jean Brun, man is characterized by "his search for Being, and by the failure of this search" [Brun 1988, 363], man poses himself the fundamental questioning of "Who am I?" Having asked the question of "What am I?" people falsely believe that they can fully appreciate their true nature. However, the question "Who am I?" enables people to thoroughly appreciate their being, unveils a completely different picture that is no longer marred by one's desire to plan and dominate, which reveals the reality of the world.
In man's self-consciousness, insofar as it exists in and through the creative power of language, there exists a force that can reveal the falsehood of the question "What am I?" If man recognizes himself thus in his human condition, the question "What am I?" will have to change into the question "Who am I?" That is to say, the search for self through a kind of nostalgia for the origins that can only be attained through Redemption. Confined to his condition, man, through this change of approach, must then seek another pathway that does not come from himself. Jean Brun says that philosophy tends to be nothing more than the history of concepts, while its task is to make us "aware of the distance that separates the Earth from the Heaven, so as to avoid slumbering and awaiting Heaven that ignores the earth, or celebration of the earthly that takes itself for the Heavenly" [Brun 1979a, 89]. Since Jean Brun's theses of 1961, all his works were, "an exhortation to acknowledge that there is no solution for us lying within ourselves" [Canguilhem 1996, 5], explains Georges Canguilhem. This means that through the dead ends to which we are constantly misled, "a Sign crosses the world that does not come from itself" [Brun 1979b, 212]. It is so for man to recognize the necessity of transcendence. As for language, Jean Brun recognizes that it speaks to us from and in "the symbolic field […] where search for the lost thread takes place." It is the poetic word, "evocative of Absence that is beyond all absences […] Absence that corrodes the touchstone of the totalitarian triumphism of its own thoughts that never think without wondering: what they think or what it means to think." [Brun 1985, 181]. In the search for Absence, the deployment of the language cannot do without supplication and lamentation, and when it addresses the "other face of Absence […] it becomes a prayer. In prayer, the existent, which is far from monologue, entrusts to language the mission to cross the walls of the world and to open this existence to the Message that can illuminate it […]. Prayer is not addressed to an existent, even if it is hypostatized by absolute superlatives" [Brun 1985, 226-228]. Jean Brun writes that through prayer man is integrated in the original power of Language, which speaks to man and man is listening to this Language, while being language itself. In this situation, which arises from the unconditioned experience of emptiness and desert and where neither man nor the world is worth any more affirmation, there will be this total transmutation -of the individual existence and the existence of the world -that will make all reality recognized in the Word that has come to the world. Jean Brun completes the description of the cycle of self-renouncement necessary to man: "In order for our language to contain in itself anything other than what it is able to say stricto sensu, it is necessary that the appeal that it makes be made from the Visitation that originally received" [Brun 1985, 252]. Thus, according to Jean Brun, the texts of the Scriptures are there to remind us that "through language, man goes to the threshold from which the transcendent word, whose Absence was manifested beyond all absences, reaches him" [Brun 1985, 237]. Brun wrote that the true concept of salvation states that "only Christianity can open the world to a light, which the world is incapable of giving birth to" [Brun 1980, xvii].
To repeat a very beautiful expression that Xavier Tilliette said on this philosopher's death, "the invasion of eternity" into the soul of Jean Brun was "in agreement with the author's career" [Tilliette 1996, 28].