Baldin Saint Girone, philosopher. “Notre Dame disaster turned into fortune”

On April 15, 2019, we trembled for Notre Dame. A whole world that we assumed was real and fundamental was collapsing before our eyes. The building opens its doors again. Baldin Saint Giraud*, professor emeritus of universities, member of the University Institute of France, followed the restoration project.

Madame Figaro. – The reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris creates great expectations for the public, as a sign of the collective desire of the majority of citizens for the cathedral to be finally restored. How do you understand this expectation?
Baldine Saint Girons. “Anxiety leaves traces that are difficult to erase. However admirable the restoration of Notre Dame is, it will be difficult to forget the fire that made it necessary. The announcement of the complete renovation of our cathedral was deeply pleasing; but how can we do without mourning? Our president Emmanuel Macron was like Santa Claus or a skilled magician. Nothing was lost because the money was coming, and the Notre Dame could have appeared in almost the same way.This “almost” is problematic.

For what?
The paradox is in the feasibility and impracticability of our temple, and the irreparable, or simply chaotic, gap between the old and the new. Unless the divine and providential hand comes to give eternal life to what it touches. Creation, extending its ties to the past construction with mere imitation then becomes creation, a work of faith and individual and collective genius. The wait grows into impatience, regardless of whether you are Catholic or not. The suspense is real.

You speak of a “deep passion” for our temple that is hidden in each of our hearts.What will be the motive for this passion?
On April 15, 2019, we trembled for Notre Dame. A whole world that we thought was real and fundamental was in danger of falling apart. Heirs about to be disinherited. We realized the fragility of our little selves and the vulnerability of our possessions. Making us shudder with fear , both from joy, the Mother of God awakens passions that touch on “self-preservation”, opposed to purely social passions. We remember it in the joyful excitement that invades us from the appearance of its guardian figure. So not everything happens at the level of awareness; we must “visceralize” the aesthetic questions to give them their true dimensions.In any case, there is no automation of proximity. Françoise, Proust’s old servant, was fascinated by the magnificence of the vanished cathedrals, as he told his master, but although he had lived in Paris for a long time, he had no desire to go to Notre Dame. As Proust explains, he moved spontaneously between the two spaces; one for porous imagination and dreams, the other for the concern of objectivity. Where to “locate the objects of our dreams.” is its insides, “explodes”, as Proust writes, and drives our cultural imagination.

What feelings did the burning temple evoke in all of us?
Like all important emotions, these emotions are also confused by the accumulation and compression of heterogeneous ideas, which begin to revolve around their center – the fear of impending disaster can we respond to the inflammation of sensibility that causes it.The necessary viaticum defines Jacques Lacan: […] he must find his way there.’ Every object is on the verge of destruction. but a lifeline may arise. Paradoxically, I must accept a new duty. not only to inform myself, like any knowing and reasonable being, but to attach myself to thinking about the negative, and to try to enter into a new idea of ​​reality and truth, which is revealed to me by the sense of impending doom; That is, if I do not immediately feel the “contagion of sublimity” that Balzac talks about. The other side of modern history. We relate to works sometimes with the prosaism of everyday life, without actually seeing them, sometimes with the splendor of life imbued with the riches of culture and imagination. When Gabriel d’Annunzio came to contemplate the smoking ruins of Reims Cathedral, he did not mourn or seek solace. The only thing that mattered to him as a passionate traveler was the current image of the cathedral, which had been transformed by fire and whose magnificence reached its peak a mad desire that seized him;

The sublime is a disruptor that arises in a given environment and reworks it in its own way

Baldine Saint Girons

Are we to understand the attachment of the French to the temple as an attachment to what you define as “ one of the most striking encounters between the beautiful and the sublime “?
Our reasons for being attached to Notre Dame continue to grow. We are waiting for the resurrection of the rod screen, which, as a creator of obscurity, was destroyed at the beginning of the 18th century.^e century. Its original polychromy is currently fixed. We are amazed at the identification of the remains in the anthropomorphic sarcophagus, our beloved poet Joachim du Belay. We will soon discover the restoration of the great organ; it will allow us to better understand the musical influence of our temple and the role of the curved apse in enhancing its resonance dual and contemplate the systematic critique of beauty formed under the auspices of the sublime.When Balzac speaks of “sublime beauties,” we understand that there are beauties that are not noble, that is, true, but not very lovable and not very stimulating. This is what we clearly hear in English, the language of which A philosophical inquiry into the origins of our notions of the sublime and the beautiful (1757), by Edmund Burke, which was a longtime bestseller. Let’s say, what I find sublime or not in the secret of my inner being depends on me, while beauty, on the contrary, has quasi-objectivity. It exists independently of me and is self-sufficient in the immovable heaven.

Baldine Saint Girons is especially the author of Fiat lux, a noble philosophy. (1993), The Sublime from Antiquity to the Present
(2005), Margins of Night. For another drawing story (2006), Aesthetic Power