Excerpt from the article by Alain Supiot, “Revue Défense Nationale” 2022/2 (No. 847), pp. 30-38
In a letter to Father Mersenne dated April 15, 1630, Descartes justified his belief in the inviolability of mathematical truths in these terms: “It is God who established these laws in nature, just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom… It will be said that if God established these truths, he could change them as a king makes his laws; to which the answer is yes, if his will can change. – But I understand them as eternal and immutable. – And I judge God in the same way” (1). These few lines illuminate the diversity of the facets – theological, legal, and epistemological – of sovereignty, whose genealogy must be traced to understand its place in de Gaulle’s work.
The concept of sovereignty was forged at the same time as that of the State by medieval jurists and theologians, for whom the primary figure of the sovereign was the all-powerful God of the Old Testament (2). Being a product of the institutional history of Western Europe, these concepts of State and sovereignty cannot be projected without caution onto earlier periods or other civilizations. Classical Roman law ignores sovereignty, the political sphere being conceived through the notions of imperium, potestas, auctoritas, or ius (3). Similarly, to take just one example, Japan did without it until the 19th century, when it adopted it in order to be recognized as a “sovereign State” by Western powers; but this adoption gave rise to definitions of sovereignty unknown in the West (4). It is therefore essential not to confuse the generality of the problem that sovereignty addresses with the specificity of the solution it provides.
This general problem is the one Descartes poses concerning mathematical truths: how can we be certain of certain laws in a finite world, when the infinite universe to which it belongs remains largely inscrutable to us? Thus formulated, this problem is not only theological, but also epistemological, for it leads to the recognition that, faced with an infinite universe, humankind can only acquire finite knowledge on its own. The recognition of this finitude, at the dawn of the Renaissance, opened an indefinite field for scientific progress, without ever being able to claim to attain absolute truth, which belongs to religion and not to science (5). Such is the meaning of the “learned ignorance” promoted by Nicholas of Cusa at the dawn of the Renaissance (6), the equivalent of which is found in this Malian proverb recounted by the philosopher Amadou Hampâté Bâ: “He who knows that he does not know, will know; he who does not know that he does not know, will not know.”
