Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Ellul

Ellul is yanking the “world situation” out of the clouds and dropping it into the only laboratory he trusts: lived experience. The provocation lands in the first clause. “Go back to the starting point” is a rebuke to the intellectual’s most flattering habit - treating abstraction as moral altitude. For Ellul, that altitude is where ideology breeds: the grand diagnosis, the ready-made “systems” that claim to see everything while quietly excusing the seer from being seen.

The deliberate gendering matters. Ellul doesn’t say “humanity” or “the citizen”; he says “the woman whom she knows,” then tightens the screw: “first of all to herself.” In a mid-century French intellectual culture that routinely universalized the male standpoint, this is both correction and challenge. The subtext is that the so-called neutral observer is typically a man smuggling his position into theory; starting with “herself” forces the thinker to confront situatedness, embodiment, power - the texture that big narratives sand down.

It also reads like Ellul’s wider suspicion of modern technique and propaganda: once the “world situation” becomes an object out there, it’s easily managed, narrated, instrumentalized. Beginning at the intimate level isn’t navel-gazing; it’s an anti-propaganda discipline. You test your concepts against the person you can’t evade, the life you can’t mythologize without consequences.

The intent, finally, is ethical. Ellul is insisting that thought earns authority through self-implication. If your analysis doesn’t start where your complicities live, it’s not analysis; it’s theater.