Don Juan de Molière

Don Juan and hypocrisy: Molière (1622-1673). First performance of Don Juan in the Palais-Royal in 1665, i.e. fifteen years after the first publication of Hobbes' Leviathan. Molière studied with Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), a philosopher who was an acquaintance of Hobbes. Because of Don Juan, he had problems with the Roman Catholic Church. Don Juan was banned from performance in France until the end of the XIXth century (1884). Molière, in Tartuffe's Preface: "The best way of attacking vice is to expose it to general laughter. People can easily put up with rebukes but they cannot bear ridicule. They are quite willing to be wicked but they do not want to appear ridiculous". The essence of ridicule: What is ridicule? What makes us laugh? Someone is or can become ridiculous if he does not see himself the motive of his own actions, desires or passions. In other words, someone is liable be ridiculed who lacks self-knowledge. Is a vicious man ridiculous? Only if virtue is knowledge. Otherwise, a vicious man is ridiculed when he is not aware of his own vice, when, e.g., he thinks of himself as a virtuous man. Virtuous appearances are always liable to ridicule. Is Don Juan evidently ridiculous in Molière's play? No. Why? Contrary to others, Don Juan's morality is real, and not merely apparent. Don Juan seems perfectly aware of what he wants and why he does it. Conscious of being what he is, Don Juan can live the life of a seducer or a libertine more fully than the other would-be seducers who do not have the courage or the self-confidence to face up to the fact that the only thing worth living for is physical beauty. Don Juan's courage: If this is true, what must we think about Don Juan's description by Scagnarelle? Cf. I, i, pp. 9-10. Scagnarelle is right insofar as Don Juan is not a moral man. But he is wrong insofar as Don Juan's lack of morality is special: it is fully assumed. Proof? Cf. I, ii. 15. Don Juan speaks like a book. He thought this through. E.g. Tiger Woods. If we compare Tiger Woods to Don Juan, then what is admirable in Don Juan shines through more forcefully. What is it? To be a Don Juan, it is not enough to be wealthy, famous and beautiful. One also has to be courageous. Why? Because it takes some courage to really live independently, i.e. without giving a damn about what others think of one's behavior or actions. The hypocrisy of others: What is hypocrisy in general? A hypocrite is a man who intentionally appears to be what he is not in reality. What does it mean for a virtuous man to be a hypocrite? It means that the love that this man is supposed to have for the beautiful and the good isn't the sole or prime motive of his "virtuous" actions. The virtue of most men is the result of their fear or cowardice. It is not truly virtue. Are fear and cowardice motives able to make a man virtuous? No. E.g. Tiger Woods. A man who is fearful coward will fail to be either virtuous or vicious. He won't be anything. Don Juan's sincerity: Is Don Juan a hypocrite? No. He lies, but he is not a hypocrite, ... until the very end of the play. He is not a hypocrite because He doesn't mind having a bad reputation as long as his bad reputation does not prevent him from enjoying what he enjoys most: physical beauty. He has the courage the face the terrible truth about human existence and live according to it. What is the terrible truth about human existence that Don Juan thinks he has the courage to face up to and that other men run away from? The fact that, in reality, there is no true love, nothing on the surface of this planet that can be loved eternally. The question raised by Molière in Don Juan is the following: Is Don Juan a man to be envied? Is he right in his evaluation of human existence or is he wrong? Don Juan as an erotic man: What is a life to be envied? What is a happy life? A life of freedom, the life of the free man who feels comfortable doing only what he wants to do, who has no regrets and no remorse, and who doesn't do anything because he has to, because it is his duty. In other words? The most enviable life that we can think of is the life of an erotic man, i.e. the life of a man who is driven exclusively by desires for good things, who never acts out of cowardice or fear or dread of bad things. Is Don Juan the erotic man par excellence? Is he a man to be envied? To know if Don Juan is the erotic man par excellence, we have to answer the following question: Based on what you've read so far, where does Don Juan get his pleasures from? What are his motives? Does Don Juan sometimes act out of fear or cowardice or regret? Or is he always acting out of some positive desire for something? Don Juan's motives: Lust for sexual gratification. The pleasure that he gets from contemplating something beautiful. "For myself, I am ravished by beauty wherever I find it, and I yield at once to the sweet violence with which it takes us captive" (I, ii, 14). The feeling of power ...