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 “practical intelligence,” 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 Word—who 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 polytheism—while 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. “Speech” avoids what, for instance, “Logos” or “Word” would suggest—or, even most annoyingly, impose on Western ears. So at the outset, it is advisable to distance ourselves from Logos (the Greeks’ “word-reason”), as carefully as from the Christian Word, preserved in unique revelation. The heading “efficacious speech” seems to me adequate as a way into determining what the notion of “efficacy” could arion 20.1 spring/summer 2012 mean—in various cultures which have been put into perspective and examined experimentally along with contemporary comparative practices, which are responsive to the usefulness of “de-centering” and “de-contextualizing” a category (both ancient and modern) like efficacy. On this twofold level—conducting comparisons while experimenting with comparatives—I think François Jullien’s venture offers a prime opportunity.3 As a matter of fact, in the 1970s and 1980s two Hellenists showed “cunning intelligence” [in a book of the same name —ed.] brought face to face with practical Reason as the key to efficacy—as “discovered” by a Sinologue philosopher, François Jullien. Each of his inquiries seems to me now inseparable from his own individual history. With respect to “cunning intelligence,” 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, it’s a question of performing an autopsy on the model coming out of the inquiry on mêtis, and of analyzing certain results that it produced—especially in François Jullien’s Sinological work. any reader paying close attention to the Greek mêtis undoubtedly noted the gap, the gulf, between the last chapter [of Cunning Intelligence], woven around “The Circle and the Bond” but introducing “reversals” 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, “the fundamental questions .” This was how a clear-cut distinction in “Greek thought” 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 thought—to 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 Greeks’ public uses of language and of what is understood by the term Greek thought. From...