I am delighted to see that education is currently giving rise to many debates, ranging from general education to language teaching, and I hope that we will not rush things, as is too often done when one cannot bear the tension between contradictory truths and that one believes that it is better to decide than to mature a question. What concerns us here is not so much to know whether we should entrust our education to the ancients or to the moderns, or to choose between the teaching of language or literature, but rather to ask ourselves what thought is .
The various goals assigned to education (to curb violence, to form responsible citizens, autonomous individuals, competent workers, etc.) will not be achieved without the development of a thought that embraces them in the same problematic. I propose here a definition of thought likely to guide pedagogical choices: thought as the stopping time necessary to perceive the tension between the opposites which solicit it and writing which makes it possible to master this tension by regulating the mental speed.
A time out
Anyone who does not think pays the price, as we have all experienced one day or another after having acted without thinking about it, carried by a more or less blind force that goes by many names (instinct, desire, destiny, fashion). The violence that continues to dictate human history sufficiently proves this lack of thought, this inability to step aside, to get out of this mechanism which condemns us to repeat the same errors, despite the reforms or revolutions which all wanted to correct them. .
For Simone Weil, who has thought a lot about the reign of force, “thought resides in this brief interval between momentum and action. Where thought has no place, justice and prudence have none”. To create this “brief interval” in which the world appears to us, even confusedly, in its totality, it is paradoxically necessary that we withdraw from the world and from ourselves and that these two poles, while being distinct, participate in the same reality: I am in the world and the world is in me.
It is from this “stopping time”, which men impose on their so-called natural movement, that “our regard for our fellow human beings proceeds”. Thought is born of this shock that occurs when reality appears to us as an infinite field of relationships between me and others, what I see and imagine, the past and the future, the finite and the infinite.
It is the goal of all education to bring the pupil (and the teacher) to cultivate these shocks and to make them a creative force by learning to detect in the works these tensions from which they draw a form which, according to the creators and the era leans sometimes on this side of the world (Aristotle, Balzac, Bohr, etc.), sometimes on the other (Plato, Rimbaud, Einstein, etc.).
Any student can understand old or difficult works very well, if they are shown that “everything is created by necessity and discord” (Heraclitus), that the history of philosophy, literature or science recounts the human adventure, which sometimes consists in venturing out of the known at the risk of being overwhelmed by the unknown, sometimes in taming the unknown by cultivating one’s garden, at the risk of falling asleep there while forgetting the death that lurks around. We cannot fundamentally modernize general education, because what forms is the thought that unfolds in time and whose task is precisely to unfold in time, to connect the beginning and the end.
The right speed
Thought is therefore a pause which, by awakening us to the immensity of the real, enlarges the self at the risk of throwing us into a state of amazement or projecting us into a kind of vertigo. Those who don’t think will reproduce the commercial murmur and the violence born of the fear of the unknown. Anyone who thinks risks being petrified or carried away by what he discovers.
This is why the exercise of thought is unthinkable without writing which regulates its speed: “All thought must, depending on the sentence, constantly be D thought, D composed” (Michaux). Going from one word to another, from one sentence to another, is to go back and forth between me and the world, to recompose reality whose complexity and mobility have been revealed to me by thought. This is why we cannot dissociate substance from form, knowledge from writing: “Better writing means better thinking” (Nietzsche).
Must we remember here that the teaching of contemporary works or questions cannot spare thought which, alas, like the world, was not born with us? That before “daring to think for oneself”, as a hip-hop philosopher (Jérémie McEwen) wishes, one must have learned to think, know that thinking is not “the art of convincing”, but rather the art of remaining silent until speech gradually emerges from silence and creates the inner space of the world?