“You have to carry chaos in yourself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. This reflection by Nietzsche, which concludes Jacques Senécal’s collaboration with Philosophy homework, seems to contradict the preface of the collection, our columnist and philosopher Normand Baillargeon, acclaiming “reason and knowledge as tools of emancipation” to “make philosophy popular”. But is not thought born of freedom?
The open-mindedness of Normand Baillargeon and Robert Dutrisac, one of the editorial writers of To have to, which signs the introduction, makes it possible to welcome the surprises and the singularities of thought, without which this one, through its history, would no longer be itself. For example, Senécal, essayist, retired philosophy professor, follower of “voluntary simplicity”, is not afraid to shake us by recalling, following Nietzsche, that our civilization “rests on emptiness more than on plenitude”. .
Among the 22 texts in the collection, only those of Senécal on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Mathieu Burelle on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) seem to defy conventions by presenting thinkers that some will consider as writers, artists , rather than as philosophers. Burelle, a collaborator much younger than Senécal and professor of philosophy at Montmorency College, is inspired by Rousseau to judge the current phenomenon of social networks.
He explains: “Self-love, maintains Rousseau, is always good. Self-esteem, on the contrary, is at the origin of all our ills. This threatens social networks, which, according to Burelle, are aimed at “the quest for recognition”. As for Dutrisac, he lists, in the introduction, other current themes: democracy, freedom of the press, censorship, politics, etc., illustrated by John Stuart Mill, Saint-Simon and more recent philosophers: Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Hans Jonas, Pierre Bourdieu…
Like Burelle, Charlotte Groulx, finishing her bachelor’s degree in law at UQAM, represents young intellectuals and also addresses the very contemporary ethical issue of the use of social networks. Based on Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), a German naturalized American essayist, she highlights the presence of women in the history of philosophy, by making their voices heard, so long almost absent.
Charlotte Groulx thinks, like Hannah Arendt, that “love and kindness can only exist in the private space”. She believes that they destroy themselves in the public space of social networks, where “the staging of the self” is harmful. The search for intimacy thus becomes daring, somewhat reminiscent of the boldness to which Nietzsche exhorted the philosophers by shouting to them: “Build your houses on the edge of Vesuvius!” » It is a question of resisting the shamelessness of the sheepish spirit.