On Efficacy in Practical Reason: Comparative Approaches MARCEL DETIENNE (Translated by Meredith C. Peters) on a round-trip: greece-china In the field of comparative anthropology questions should be unusual and improbable, that is, if they are meant to be experimental and constructive. Issues that have become familiar regain singularity when you discover their proto-history. So âpractical intelligence,â as I once understood it, was first Greek, marginal, and cunning.1 Sometime later it met up with a comparative anthropology of speech, fanned out around the Goddess Wordâwho had come from the Vedic world, where she seemed to rule the registers of voice and song as completely as the entire range of literary genres.2 This was a time when many anthropologists and historians were considering the structures of polytheismâwhile awaiting experiments and comparisons to be made among the hundreds of societies fond of imagining genies, inventing supernatural entities, and every day creating lower-case divine little nothings. No research code forbids investigating efficacy and practical reason through a comparative anthropology of speech. âSpeechâ avoids what, for instance, âLogosâ or âWordâ would suggestâor, even most annoyingly, impose on Western ears. So at the outset, it is advisable to distance ourselves from Logos (the Greeksâ âword-reasonâ), as carefully as from the Christian Word, preserved in unique revelation. The heading âefficacious speechâ seems to me adequate as a way into determining what the notion of âefficacyâ could arion 20.1 spring/summer 2012 meanâin various cultures which have been put into perspective and examined experimentally along with contemporary comparative practices, which are responsive to the usefulness of âde-centeringâ and âde-contextualizingâ a category (both ancient and modern) like efficacy. On this twofold levelâconducting comparisons while experimenting with comparativesâI think François Jullienâs venture offers a prime opportunity.3 As a matter of fact, in the 1970s and 1980s two Hellenists showed âcunning intelligenceâ [in a book of the same name âed.] brought face to face with practical Reason as the key to efficacyâas âdiscoveredâ by a Sinologue philosopher, François Jullien. Each of his inquiries seems to me now inseparable from his own individual history. With respect to âcunning intelligence,â an experiment conducted with JeanPierre Vernant, I believe it is necessary to take apart the mechanics of the research, performed by two and sometimes even four hands. For me, itâs a question of performing an autopsy on the model coming out of the inquiry on mĂȘtis, and of analyzing certain results that it producedâespecially in François Jullienâs Sinological work. any reader paying close attention to the Greek mĂȘtis undoubtedly noted the gap, the gulf, between the last chapter [of Cunning Intelligence], woven around âThe Circle and the Bondâ but introducing âreversalsâ with their minute mechanisms,4 and the introduction, written, as is usual, at the close of the investigation. It goes without saying that, given our deep friendship and the two decades that united us, it was Jean-Pierre Vernant, the philosopher, who clarified the broad lines of our experimentation and took responsibility for posing, as he used to say, âthe fundamental questions .â This was how a clear-cut distinction in âGreek thoughtâ came to be formulated between geometric philosophical reason, with its conceptual formalism, and practical on efficacy in practical reason 44 intelligence, with its expertise in wiles and quick thinking for adapting to constantly shifting situations. At the time, it seemed opportune to make clear the contrast between a geometric type of reason, bound to the intelligibility of Being, and the little flashes of practical and technical intelligence, which are spread among multiple skills and kinds of knowledge that are often discrete. Gradually, the clear-cut distinction between these two forms of thought and two types of rationality became radical: the one would exclude the other and would prepare, without any real intention , for the advent of scientific thoughtâto lead us (as was soon to be propounded) from Plato to Galileo and Newton. A comparativist cannot be indifferent to the effects of a model, both on the Greeksâ public uses of language and of what is understood by the term Greek thought. From...