Living with intensity

To make our lives a succession of intense moments, to live each day as the first... or the last, to go further, higher, stronger.

We are regularly invited to seek intensity to bring extra quality to our lives. Philosopher and writer Tristan Garcia has studied this concept and the origins of its success...

An electrical origin

Like many of his interviews, Tristan Garcia begins his book with a discussion of electricity. A subject of great curiosity in the 18th century, electricity at the time was the image of intensity, i.e. a qualitative and therefore unmeasurable variation. It was imagined to be at the heart of all life, inspiring libertines and later Romantics alike.

But it soon became the object of science, measurement and calculation. The mystery and promise it held disappeared. Intensity, which expresses a qualitative variation that cannot be measured, disappears as soon as it is defined or expressed in numbers.

But figures of intensity continue to exist.

Models for living with intensity

Tristan Garcia evokes the libertine. He lives in variation, change and movement. The intensity of what he experiences is more important to him than pleasure or pain. Whether suffering or pleasure, he seeks above all the intensity of sensation. Risk, suffering and emotion give us a sense of existence.

The author also introduces us to the figure of the romantic, who seeks in storms and raging landscapes an image of an inner self torn, torn apart and overwhelmed by emotions. Even when he's bored, the romantic is intensely bored!

Finally, Tristan Garcia offers us the character of the rocker, who masters electricity thanks to technique, but who seems himself to have become an electrical being!

We could add the traveler, like Sylvain Tesson, author of "En avant, calme et fou, une esthétique de la bécane". Crossing frozen lakes on motorcycles with uncertain mechanics makes you forget the emptiness of life. The risk, the cold, the extreme conditions give a sense of existence. "When you go and put your existence in danger, you get an intensity out of it, an intensification of life," he explained in December 2017 on the literary program "La Grande Librairie". "As I don't ask anything from the idea of an afterlife, I want with appetite to feed on what the journey can offer me. So I have to intensify it. That's why I'm going to look for movement practices".

Maintaining intensity

As intensity is a qualitative variation, it seems impossible to maintain it. Tristan Garcia shows us that the only way to temporarily maintain high intensity is to run forward.

There are several solutions. We can play on movement, change and variety. "I'm interested in everything that moves, everything that makes movement, everything that makes the road interesting," says Sylvain Tesson.

Another means is acceleration. Going faster, changing faster... but our physical limits make it impossible to continue along this path for very long.

Finally, Tristan Garcia notes that the intensity of an event is all the greater when it's a "first time". First meeting, first kiss, first contact with a country or culture. Why not experience everything as if it were a first time? Here again, the stratagem is blunted. "Intense people tire quickly. A living being cannot maintain intensity for long.

Continuing with Sylvain Tesson, we might add that giving a friend an experience you've already had yourself helps to recapture the intensity of a first time. Taking your friend Ludovic Escande to the summit of Mont-Blanc, even though he suffers from vertigo and has no training whatsoever, renews the sense of adventure. In training, games or network exchanges, the collaborative aspect also renews the intensity of what is experienced. The feeling of repetition is slow to set in when surprises can occur at any moment of interaction with other people.

In the world of digital technology and training, these remarks no doubt apply to all the 3D or immersive experiences that flourish, attract attention, provoke a "wow!" effect and then become commonplace. The special effects that accentuate the emotion of certain sequences in films soon seem lukewarm, and others have to replace them, but without ever recapturing the intensity experienced by the first spectators of Georges Méliès or the Lumière brothers.

A difficult balance

Our quest for intensity is doomed to hit the ceiling of our limits. So much so, in fact, that the ultimate step, the one that would bring something new, would be precisely the experience of the absence of intensity. We oscillate between a yearning for intensity that never fades, and a desire for life without intensity, without variation, without highs or lows...