At the end of January, I am not planning any trips, I have a book in progress that no publisher is impatiently waiting for, nothing else calls me than the desire to be fully where I am, in the most extraordinarily daily, carried from morning to evening by a flood of light sometimes gray, sometimes bright. But, sooner or later, from this sweet drowsiness that is idleness big questions arise, like that of this dead friend who, last night, asked me what I was waiting for to go join him. I told him that I wanted to understand the world before leaving it, and I went back to sleep as best I could.
I understand that understanding the world is an immense task that requires so much knowledge that it would take me another lifetime or two to reach the beginning of an explanatory hypothesis. However, I lack time, and I am not particularly intelligent, gifted for this work of abstraction which consists of accumulating data and reducing it to some equation which gives it meaning. This incompetence is very unfortunate, because I want to understand everything and cannot be satisfied with this or that knowledge, however accurate it may be.
My friend’s question spoiled the joy of finding him in my dream. Fortunately, when I woke up, I remembered that the primary meaning of “understand” is “to contain in oneself” and that the world is not just outside of me this complex machine that I would have to decode otherwise. of receiving a bad grade (hell: being thrown into a problem that we couldn’t solve), but something alive that began to live inside me when I thought about it: “By the space, the universe understands me and engulfs me like a point; in thought I understand it. »
Pascal is right: if we want to understand the universe and not be swallowed up by it, we must constantly think about it, but not too much, because then the desire to understand everything risks distracting us from our task which is to be attentive to this other breathing that is thought, which comes and goes between the universe and us as we go to the market to pick up everything we need to eat. Understanding everything does not mean that we can nourish ourselves once and for all, explain everything, achieve objective, definitive knowledge of reality, but that we can on the contrary tend towards a truth which always escapes us and which is revealed paradoxically in the gropings and repetitions of a search whose object is similar to the “beloved” of which Verlaine says that she “is, each time, neither quite the same, nor quite another, And [l]love and [le] understand “.
Knowledge, that which justifies devoting one’s whole life to it, from the school benches to the window near which one awaits death, is a story of reciprocal love (I can only know that which seeks to recognize itself in me) which has no other goal than to remain in movement towards the other, to consent to its inexhaustible depth.
Thought in this way, knowledge has nothing to do with an action that begins and ends, the value of which can be measured by the quantity of knowledge acquired or the speed of its acquisition, but is a way of living attentive to the distance that beats in the close, similar in the different. This is why I find it very difficult to understand why we use various technologies to accelerate learning processes, such as the resources offered by artificial intelligence (having your texts written and corrected by ChatGPT and Antidote?), so many shortcuts which deprive the student of the time he wastes searching for the answers to the questions he asks himself, whether it is a rule of grammar, the understanding of a problem philosophical, of the analysis of a literary work, because it is in this lost time which slows down thought that thought perceives precisely what it is doing: making the transition from reality to its intelligible translation, the passage from multiplicity ( sensations, feelings, images) to simplicity (of a sentence, of a concept, of an equation), and return to the things from which the words were nourished, removed.
What have I learned from these hours wasted learning various grammars by heart and translating Greek, Latin and English texts, other than that the language, like the thought of which it is a translation, makes its way among a field of more or less complex relationships, that writing is above silence a thin thread stretched between the world and me? I also have a lot of trouble with these idols of education which are the principles of excellence and success which govern the creation of three-tier study programs.
To counter this educational translation of capitalism which distinguishes the strong and the weak, which manufactures robots and consumers, to protect social justice, mental health and the intellectual integrity of teachers and students condemned to success, it would be good to display on all screens, before turning them off, this Buddhist truth that all wise people have always taught: the path is the goal. If my friend comes back to see me tonight, I will tell him that I am trying to erase the little I know to find him in this world that loves me and understands me.