Should we philosophize with children? Is childhood a particular anthropological regime to the point where the doxa has not yet tinged the logic of the puer cogitans with its epistemic biases? The question persists in the history of philosophy: are children rational and intelligent enough (not endowed with reason) to the point where necessary and universal questions can be discussed with them, notwithstanding the fact that one has to accommodate the logical forms of these questions to their singular cognitive profile? In addition to the pedagogical and didactic questions which relate to the form of the problems and their mode of exposure, are the children not minors and undervalued because of the inchoate and initiatory nature of their mode of access to intelligence?
Piaget[1], to speak only of him, but Bachelard[2], and Jaspers, like Dewey[3]introduced the idea that children think, just like adults, even if their thinking does not take the technical and sophisticated forms of Aristotle's Organon or Foucauldian archaeology. Our time, because it loves truisms and ideological facilities, strives with a rare anti-Platonic demagoguery, despite appearances, to make the child a budding philosopher, or in the making, or even to attribute to him the skills – in the absence of knowledge – of philosophizing, forgetting the Kantian caution which consists in saying that philosophizing cannot be done without a singular philosophy which lends its forms and its schemes to the logic of reflection, especially in the critical domain. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether the experience of philosophical thought with children really comes under the exercise of philosophical technique, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to question the form of philosophy required and the knowledge of the childhood that one mobilizes to authorize such audacity of instruction and training in philosophical thought. Isn't there then a confusion of the ingenuity of the philosopher's thought with spontaneous or supposedly such naivety (Freud has edified us a little since 1905 on the scienti libido of children just as perverse or complicated as that of their parents[4]) of the child? And should we not be careful not to essentialize the child, childhood, by forgetting his sex, his social, economic, institutional, historical, linguistic, institutional identities, in short, by forgetting the historical reality of the child? as a social and historical construction and the relative enthusiasm we have for its "intelligence" or its propensity for metaphysics linked to a way of thinking about the question as marked, in philosophy, with the seal of the absence of prejudices and dogmatic representations?
Another problem arises on the legitimacy of such an approach: why subject or subject children to philosophy if this leads to nihilism or to an elsewhere of being-there, beyond the good and the evil of terrain of the technè of the will of the will leading to oblivion of the enigma of the living or of being, and if philosophy only makes sense if it is a painting of gray on gray, the owl of Minerva always rising in the twilight of life[5]? Why then make children grow up too early with questions that they can only understand once their lives are over? This is Jaspers' aporia: metaphysicians ask questions that we think are naive because we have not yet reached the end and the telos of their questioning which supposes both, in order to be understood and to be instituted, a phenomenology of the Spirit rarely reached because it requires to be (to have been?) acquired with and by the maturity of the negative overcome in the Odyssey of a life strong in knowledge and truth.
Is there not a risk of spoiling and corrupting, even destroying, the souls of children by making them think about subjects that would be beyond them and would then keep them in a sort of fatal gnoseological hypnosis given the impossibility that they would have to be able to answer or even to consider a possible type of answer to questions that they do not understand by state? Plato, founder of pedagogy as we know it and who cares about the progressiveness of learning[6]as much as contemporary neuro-pedagogical epistemologists[7]behaviorists and amateurs of education and training sciences (sic), the old Plato therefore, thought that there were ages of life and moments to philosophize. From Condorcet to the modern philosophers of education, the idea of a progression, of a course, or of a curriculum to follow in order to learn and know, says that we cannot skip the stages of the formation of the 'mind. We know the importance that the notion of corruption of the soul and twisting of mores plays in the Platonic topoi; it is even one of the charges that led Socrates to the death sentence by Athens the democrat.
Also, it seems legitimate to wonder about the supposed rationality of childhood and children[8]and the approach which consists in wanting at all costs to philosophize with the children, at the risk of confusing moral education, philosophical instruction and training in the political norms of the City with the difficult exercise of critical thought urbi et orbi. Because the risk is great then of doing philosophy as Mr. Jourdain did prose, and of transforming the reflexive act consisting in detaching oneself from oneself and from the doxa into a pedagogical, technical ritual, of an academic and normative type, which evades the danger of the critical act and of the thought which risks the limits which the world of the doxa imposes on it, in itself and outside of itself. Because if there is an ethics of thought, it cannot be reduced to a morality, even to a morality, to good advice and general recommendations, even if they are citizens,
Reason and Logic of History: Fuzzy Archeology and Negative Genealogy
If the history of the child is linked in an extremely fine way with that of childhood, it is because the small human mammal must be educated for life in society, not having the capacity to support itself its needs. The genealogical myths of the wild child say nothing else, in reverse negative, than this: the human being is indeed a political animal endowed with reason and above all with political reason in the sense that the link is the binder and in the meaning that the child cannot be detached from its mother without the risk of real death for it. Without forgetting that for a long time, the parturient shared this unwanted risk of an uncertain delivery following a more or less desired pregnancy.
The alogon had to be driven (agogè) by a conductor[9]or a child raiser (paidagogè) with the capacity to say, to speak, to think, with reason and order (logos), what is the world of power, of power, of action (ageïn): pedagogy is first and foremost an art (technè) of instructing the child, the adolescent, the young man, in the knowledge of his rank, his environment, his duties, and the tasks devolved to his caste, his social class, his symbolic universe. The child, the one who does not know, cannot, must not yet speak (infari) is above all a being to be shaped within the family, by the tutor, if he comes from a free family. and rich, and before being in the service of the City or the State, he must learn to know and recognize what is worth, what is worthy of values, and what is unworthy of oneself. Childhood is therefore this uncertain time when the young child must be evaluated, trained, informed, in order to take its "natural" place in the City: and its education refers to its environment and the quality of birth given by his parents, his family, his clan, his deme. It is obvious that education or pedagogy is therefore a subsidiary issue of transmission of socio-political codes and rules of good manners specific to the reproduction of ancient and medieval society. In a world where slavery is not questioned politically but ethically and philosophically, the acceptance of the need for freedom and servitude, until the High Middle Ages, is part of a work of conditioning and formalization of actions, behaviors, discourses, practices, aimed at ensuring that everyone keeps their place. That is to say that each child learns who he is, where he comes from, and what are the specific missions and responsibilities that society, his family, his peers expect of him.
First of all, the child must be subjected to an onto-historical objective because he must know the grammar and the etymon of his being in the world, of his sources and their origins, he must know his history by learning and the memorization of the myths that organize and structure the meaning of the culture and the practices that give it its habitus and its essence, its intimate and exterior reality; the child will thus be subjected in this pedagogical process to the achievement of a genealogical objective of learning his history and his ancestors as much as his family myths, objective therefore of historicization and identification in a set of facts, laws, words, sayings, writings, various rights, by means of which he will be able to claim power or, much more modestly, to recognize it in order to make allegiance to it or not to transgress it out of ignorance of the codes and principles, at the risk of disorder which would cost him dearly from every point of view. And, finally, the child must learn to know how he must behave in situ, and therefore take such and such an attitude, when it is necessary to be silent, to speak, to submit or not, to be moved or to be insensitive, in short, to practice a concern for the self shaping a technique of existence that subjectivates its practices in order to practice precise, singular, specific ethoi and, perhaps, sometimes demanding from it the recourse to a singular invention of the self.
From these objectives, a whole section of classifications, discourses, devices, distills taxonomies, more or less hierarchical and classifying, such as those relating to idiocy, stupidity, imbecility, intellectual retardation, overflowing on questions of genetic defect, biological filiation, family purity, eugenics, dementia, etc. There is then a whole medical and biological part of the pedagogy which makes the education of the child an action that is both therapeutic or prophylactic as care given to society via a part of its youth considered as the future of the City.[10].
The child is at the crossroads of these specific practices and theories allowing the reproduction of the self, of the world, and of history, legitimizing the relationship between child and adult, child and parent, citizen and its rulers. Pedagogy is then indistinctly political advice, medical training, educational support, dietary regime and monitoring of passions.
The child is therefore taken by a network which qualifies him as such because he corresponds not only to knowledge, to a social order, but also to a specific type of relationship with another, older, and qualified by his distinction and his ability to tell the truth, to be a parrhesiast and therefore to be able to govern others because he is able to govern himself. The child must learn to develop in contact with another qualified to tell the truth and using straight talk: the pedagogue is able to tell the truth about himself and therefore to teach the child to tell the truth about self. He is the parrhesiast par excellence. To say what childhood or the child is is therefore to go back into a complex history where the intersection of disciplines, the different knowledge and the different practices have produced this singular reality situated in space and time which is called the child. A historical nominalism therefore imposes itself when we speak of it because it is not a substantial reality or a transhistorical entity or an essence, entelechy, to be developed over time, like a neurocognitive program that would be included in the DNA or the germ of the acorn called to become oak in the dialectical skein of reason in history. There is no truth of the child other than in his own; as the popular song says, one does not leave one's childhood with impunity. Which means that it is either singular and therefore comes from an intimate experience that cannot be transmitted other than in the poetic or rhetorical form of the staging of oneself, either childhood comes under a particular science, a particular epistemic mode of being which calls for skills and formal techniques that make the child disappear into the epistemic field of childhood which would only make him an object or support or event in the more general field of childhood science. This is why many historians have made childhood a historical event or advent.[11].
In fact, we can therefore say that the child is a construction of technicians who possess knowledge, knowledge, practical and theoretical and who have the exercise of this knowledge. The techne which produces, manufactures, constitutes the child can be the doctor, the gymnast, in Plato's sense, the politician, the grammarian, the teacher, the sage; this technician from childhood produces children as reality from his technical work. We are very far from the risk of parrhesiastical truth in this professional operation of the technique of begetting or producing children in paidopoietic pedagogy. The pedagogue, then the professor, are nothing other than educational technicians: they do not risk their lives, or their affective, friendly, political ties with the person to whom they are speaking. The parrhesiologist has a certain relationship to the truth that the contemporary, lay teacher, protected by the State, does not have, and who applies a program without wanting to change the nature of the links he has with his public, his pupils, his students, and, like the sage, the prophet, or the technician, the parrhesiast has children, adolescents, young people to educate; but, fundamentally different from the pedagogue, the professor, the wise man, he must instruct them in a process of life technique, self-care, outspokenness.
The child is therefore a product, a subject constituted in the history of social, educational, historical practices, which comes under practical, discursive devices, complex educational, political, social, moral techniques, and these artefacts require, in order to be grasped in their truth, an archeology of their singular constitution to understand the logics of their constitution. In addition, the teacher does not risk his life or put himself in danger when he works for an institution and according to a mission that makes him indifferent or that makes him indifferent, which can be interchangeable according to the needs of a service. who does not care about the comfort of the student and even less of the teacher. It should be recalled here that the "employees of philosophy"[12], to speak like Ferrari in his time, cannot incur the risk of overstepping their mission being precisely employed so as not to question the order that they more or less reproduce or guarantee. The child, the adolescent, the young adult, is a projection surface which only interests the technician, the pedagogical engineer, the pedagogue, insofar as it is considered as an element to be formed, plasticized, produced, according to objectives which are not alethurgic or parrhesiastic, but, its formation is done according to official objectives of a ministry or a political vision of programs, learning, evaluations. We are, in this academic logic,
Our relationship with the child is therefore through and through instituted and institutionalized by symbolic forms and historical structures that determine the way in which we can speak to him, bring him up, give him rights, subjugate him or not, include or not in this or that social, sporting, linguistic practice, subject him to this or that life or death experience. After all, it's not so long since military exercises and the martial instruction of teenagers in war ceased in our schools. The child, before being an angel or a demon, was for a long time considered a mute earth, without a fixed identity, without a future and with a more or less ephemeral present. The massacre of the Innocents was not only biblical; until recently, the fact that the child could not express himself meant that he suffered no pain or to a lesser extent than that of adults. And the question of her sex was the whole program of a certain medicine and a "psychological device"[13]who wanted so much to make the sex of the child speak that psychoanalysis gave him a language to take its place. This hyper-sexualization of the child, a polymorphic perverse according to Freud[14], culminated in a theory of pansexualism changing into everything is significant, which fed a lazy structuralism which was able to do the ellipsis of documented historical research and gray work on the material forms of apparitions. , phenomena, conditions of existence and events related to the child as such.
In fact, the child, just like childhood in the fields of a certain hasty sociology of culture[15], turns out to be more often a projection surface of the interests of the moment than a substantial or historical reality being the object of particular attention on the part of the authorities legitimized to tell the truth or to propose analyzes on it, recognized by veridiction institutions, scientific guarantees, official knowledge, positive knowledge. In this sense, the child is a nexus of epistemic fixations allowing us to understand the concern and the way a society views its offspring.
If the history of madness or unreason, as the double negative of the history of reason or common sense, could make us understand how the confinement of the insane, of mindless individuals, of idiots, wanderers and other imbeciles, for their health and the public good, we can also say that the negative of the child gradually appears on the revealing plate of our history as we free him from the bonds of work forced, mines and fields. After the Industrial Revolution where little by little he appears as a particular being, endowed with a reason and a specific power with an idiosyncrasy that must be studied to make him a good worker, a healthy and efficient work force for the machine constantly improving through the developments of research applied to economic and technical production, the child enters into the great story because it is linked to that of work and the mutations of Capital . The invisible child, made visible by its uselessness or its relative usefulness, was an opportunity for society in the 19th and early 20th centuries to question the role that it could be made to play once educated, disciplined, standardized and standardized according to the codes and purposes of Capital and the world of work that it serves in industry. The work of children, like that of women and foreigners, is not negligible in the constitution of Western wealth. Indeed, in this sense, the child was the appendage of the machine before being excluded from it, by it and its anonymous and objective logic, because of its inadequacy, its own impotence, and its lack of competence in relation to the efficient and indisputable productivity of the machine tool and its mechanical, robotic, automated avatars. In fact, the machines of big industry no longer having the flaws of the childhood of art and the epistemological ingenuity of the trades[16], the child may be the object of political attention and moral consideration on his social and health status, his rights and his own existence. Revealing the ghostly and spectral figures of the child in European literature, from the Industrial Revolution to the dawn of The Great War, would be an edifying work on the ways in which the child was the surface of expression and projection as much as a symptom of how homo occidentalis thought of himself on the brink of the disaster that dragged the world into a chaotic and generalized conflict[17].
The fact remains that the question of the childhood of reason has arisen as a pedagogy of the universal starting from the infantile singularity: the child, is it not the story of the humanity back to its origins? Studying the child, wouldn't it be, as in the Rousseauist movement which links the formation of republican society and the education of the man of man, Le contrat social and Emile, both published the same year, in 1762, link the analysis and the conditions of possibility of the best of the societies of free men to that of the formation of his judgment by a curriculum of his autonomy and his education for freedom in history considered then as a place of life necessary for the enlightened will? It seems that this historical visibility of the child appears at a time when the question of work, health, of social cohesion, of the motives for political organization in an increasingly secularized society, poses that of the meaning and function of the actors of the social place and its reproduction: childhood becomes the privileged terrain, like the native, the foreigner, the colonized, of the search for reconciliation between oneself and the other, which we want, basically, to bring back to the same thing by a game of experimental and objective scientific disciplines more or less complacent in this game of homologation and ideological recognition of the same. Renan and Ferry participate in the same paradigm of epistemological assurance: that of the anthropological reduction of the world to the "civilization" of reason defined as the unique, the best, the truest, the universal, and which asserts itself triumphant. in the order of the discourse of the dominant,
Thus, schooling the natives, or the Burgundians and the Cévennes, is part of the same ideological scheme. To educate, to subject, to assimilate, and to produce an anthropofacture of the same on the whole planet is the act of civilization par excellence: it is a question of exporting the Revolution, the sciences and the Rights of Man, as one instructs and shapes the minds and bodies of citizens on the national territory. There is only one humanity and only one master in the history of the world: in a Hegeliano-Cartesian phraseology, the 19th century trumpets the duty to civilize the masses and the obscure peoples, see obscurantists, for better emancipate them and free them from their own negativity. They will have to be educated as children are educated: to the cane and respect for the law and for the Master who knows better than them the end of this hierarchy and this domination. We must liberate the child from his wild side as we must liberate the first peoples, primitive people said in the century of Lévy-Bruhl[18]and from universalist positivism, from their own ignorance and misery. The pedagogy to be applied to the colonized will be the same, except for the last ends, as that practiced with children (and vice versa): order, method, discipline, obedience, and continuous abnegation, in order to raise the child and the primitive to the respectful recognition of the generous gifts of civilization to peoples and minors who cannot know what is good for them, not being at the stage of reason in history and of economic and technical revolution.
An empirical reason then defines what are the true sciences and the true cultures; it is a question of making understand with the children, as with the barbarians, and with the women, if possible, what are the true life and the happiness given by the Western humanism of scientific rationality and industrial progress. We will then give ourselves all the means to make understand and accept to whom it may concern this pedagogy of Good, Fair, and Progress. Even if it had to be registered by the harrow, forced labor, the gunboat or by the civilizing and didactic means of the penal colony.
The positivist turn or the science of education as the political future of citizen training
The history of humanity, in this universalizing and unifying conception, being thoroughly rational, it is clear that that of the child (included in the history of the primitive and the savage understood as stigmata or remnants of childhood of humanity) must be in the same logic. From the 17th century, treatises on education were systematized based on the theories of knowledge and the sciences of the time. The empiricism of Locke, the idealism of Descartes or Leibniz, the sensualism of Condillac, the rationalism of Condorcet, however different these theories may be from each other, agree to apply themselves to producing a pedagogy and a science of the child considered as a being of reason in the making, an entelechy to be accompanied, even to be instituted, in order to lead him on the right path of reason, to speak like Kant,[19]. The reason of the child is homologous to that of history: it is therefore enough to find the essence of childhood in the games, the ideas, the ways of feeling and imagining of the child to find the same logical than that which promotes rationality and determining and reflective judgment in man in history. Pedagogy is basically only an applied anthropology and anthropology makes it possible to understand how it is necessary to educate the child so that man becomes what he is deep down inside himself, to know: a reason in act and in potency. The entire Age of Enlightenment revolves around this idea of the perfectibility of the human being and it follows this logic the necessary education of humanity: the sooner we begin the education of the human race, the sooner we will be done with the dark reign of obscurantism. This applied scientism, which we find at work in the public policies of Renan, Ferry and Bismarck, makes the child a field that is both emblematic of the success of an educational policy but also the challenge of education of citizens. The child of today, we like to repeat, to the point of making a republican mantra out of it, is the citizen of tomorrow. The attention paid to children in the Victorian and positivist era made them an important political subject.[20]. The child then becomes the territory where Science can reveal itself in all its powers and in the deployment without complex of its techniques of education and civilization: it will apply to study and to mark out the field of childhood which becomes then the privileged place of excavations of the new social and human sciences. After all, scholars of all disciplines will say[21], for the sake of holistic determinism revealing enough of the state of mind in which we think of the child, the adult can only be an educated child, or the future of his childhood. Nietzsche will even make becoming a child again the purpose of Zarathustra's wisdom. Isn't it the child who resists civilization in itself and outside of us, and isn't it him, again, that we must listen to and let happen in the so-called active, progressive thoughts, and the pedagogies of autonomy that claim it from the Summer Hill school to the restless University of Vincennes[22]?
This does not mean that perversion is not part of the child; it is precisely because it is a component of it that it must be understood as a dialectical negativity of rationality in the making in childhood. The play and the imaginations of the child are not puerilities or childishness but rather singular and more or less complex moments of the becoming rationality of the child. In fact, any deviation from the norm calls for its moral and spiritual rectification. This is why these liberations of the child's speech are always virtuous policies aimed at producing a subject of norm and disciplined to the moral norm. The child is therefore the alibi of an orthopedic soteriology aimed at bringing him, by means of a more or less sophisticated technique, to recognize that there is only one world and only one story: that of the reason which lets him play, wander, delirious (remove his bonds), wander, free to realize his whims or not, because, in in the end, pedagogical reason is always already cunning with its desire for play and freedom. Sooner or later, the master will in fact announce to him the end of recess and the order to follow in order to become a citizen, a good family man, a less qualified producer, manager or worker, in any case, disciplined so that he produces and can effectively reproduce the order which has tolerated its relative disorder to better make it accept, henceforth, once mature and responsible, autonomous and educated, civilized and polite, the discourse of the Master and his voluntary and accepted enslavement. to be delirious (remove one's bonds), to wander, free to fulfill one's whims or not, because, in the end, pedagogical reason always already tricks its desire for play and freedom. Sooner or later, the master will in fact announce to him the end of recess and the order to follow in order to become a citizen, a good family man, a less qualified producer, manager or worker, in any case, disciplined so that he produces and can effectively reproduce the order which has tolerated its relative disorder to better make it accept, henceforth, once mature and responsible, autonomous and educated, civilized and polite, the discourse of the Master and his voluntary and accepted enslavement. to be delirious (remove one's bonds), to wander, free to fulfill one's whims or not, because, in the end, pedagogical reason always already tricks its desire for play and freedom. Sooner or later, the master will in fact announce to him the end of recess and the order to follow in order to become a citizen, a good family man, a less qualified producer, manager or worker, in any case, disciplined so that he produces and can effectively reproduce the order which has tolerated its relative disorder to better make it accept, henceforth, once mature and responsible, autonomous and educated, civilized and polite, the discourse of the Master and his voluntary and accepted enslavement.
The question of the innocence and freedom of the child is always linked to that of his control and the way to direct his conduct, his morals, his language and his life.[23]. This is why we cannot produce a vision of the child that is not a biopolitical way of producing a truth about childhood, a logic of its constitution, a cartography of its future (and thus define a politics of his being in the world, of his powers, of the frameworks of his freedoms), which defines a taxonomy, even if it is dialectical and open, which is not for the child the dream of his invention or the device by which, in negative, in heterotopic mode, the norms of the adult world enclose its future in a process of subjectivation implicitly calling for the limitation of its spontaneity.
The birth of children, says the philosopher, is the death of the parents; the pedagogy which wants to be science and which extends its history to the anthropology of the educational fact, states that the life of the children is their programmed death in their becoming adult. It is therefore more than legitimate to ask whether the identification of the child with the philosopher on the one hand is legitimate, the naivety of one not being of the same order as the reflexive prudence of the other, and, on the other hand, if the act of bringing the child into philosophy and the infancy of philosophy into the child, is indeed a philosophical act. We do not doubt the social, pedagogical, moral usefulness, in short the instrumental and practical rationality of such philosophy workshop devices with, for, by children[24]. That, since Plato and after him Rousseau, philosophy is a way of reflecting on vices and virtues and that it is an ethopoietic direction for those who practice it, there is no doubt. But, it seems to us that a drift is taking place before our eyes: the instrumentalization of philosophy to further overschool children and thus keep them away from the emancipatory character of philosophical reflection which goes beyond the academic framework of its implementation. in the school program and on its academic side.
For what is singularly lacking in the school activity of philosophy is precisely what we characterized at the beginning of this study as being the parrhesiastic singularity of philosophical thought: the courage of truth which is exercised at the risk of his life, his aura, his social position, his existence. There is a risk in philosophical praxis and to evacuate it by a school or moral staging is then to transform it into a sophistical or rhetorical practice, or even worse, to make it a leisure or relaxation activity without ethical and political consequences on oneself, the other, the world. To think philosophically is also and above all to take with oneself and against oneself a turn which is not a matter of technè,[25].
The risk of childhood in philosophy: the aporia of genealogical reason and the moralization of the child in the philosophy of teachers
To philosophize with children without taking into account the history of their subjectivation and their constitution in the field of history which made them be what they are or the way in which they appear in our episteme seems to me to be very imprudent. There is indeed a way today of using children and their language to make people believe that we are philosophizing with them as soon as we make them say, state, construct propositions that astonish a certain adult world, cut off from any use of critical reason: the putting into words of an experience or an emotion only becomes philosophical if this shaping is accompanied by a critical question which in turn modifies the subject who develops a language of exposition . If this reflexivity and if this elaboration transform the subject, not in a virtuous or ephemeral way, but by operating a distancing of oneself from oneself and another way of speaking the world, then there is a critical emancipation which frees the subject from its customary and doxic conveniences. Otherwise, the child then becomes the alibi of a morality of order and philosophy, or the word philosophy, is used to make the world of “communication” or “philosophical discussion” acceptable. It seems to us that philosophy with children then becomes a technique of animation aimed at making people accept the populist excesses of moralizing or accusing reflection on current events, making the world or the worldview (Weltanschauung) of the economy more familiar illiberal, make believe that pedagogical excesses are moments of real learning,
Ihe standards of biopolitical behavior to which we are subject, the disciplines of all kinds which govern us, and which may be implicit in the era of digital communication and mass propaganda, suppose on the part of professionals of critical thought, intellectuals, specific, in the sense of Foucault and in situation, in the sense of Sartre[26], that they know exactly what their speeches and their discursive practices mean, at the moment of their enunciation. It is clear that if the practice of philosophy does not question the parrhesiastic character of thought, then it will become a discipline of discussion, of rhetoric, of entertainment, or of the aesthetic shaping of emotions, more or less labeled pedagogical. , and that it then risks becoming the compendium of a cynical world where information and knowledge, as tools of critical emancipation, will be evaded in favor of the protocols of speaking and entertaining which flourish in the media windows of the digital world.
The Childhood Event, or the world of the child, rightly calls for a deviation from the norm or a stochastic and aporetic innovation because it is unpredictable and dangerous for the orderly arrangement of the orders of discourse. In this sense, the ethics of truth that runs through philosophical practice cannot accommodate a ritualization of philosophical "discussion" or an institutionalization of the "philosophical café" (which is not the agora) that is prejudicial to the audacity of telling the truth or to the emergence of a word of veridiction which brings out the possibility of thinking other than in the constrained and academic form of an orthodox constraint.
After all, the child's eschaton is not in the ethos of the adult who conforms to the world where he does not have to think of his being in the world elsewhere than in and by the schemes of his conditioning to the reproduction of its logic of existence: the world of childhood remains a memory of the future for what does not yet have a place and a name and therefore which by definition escapes an epistemic framing, even if it is stamped in a rhetorical as: philosophical. True philosophy making fun of philosophy, the child in philosophy escapes in fact from a positive philosophy of his duty-to-be and calls instead for a genealogy of our knowledge and our pedagogy, so sure of itself that it forgets about it. its history and the processes of its academic recognition.
This movement towards uncertainty makes the child in the making seem like one who is never present in the desire for the Same: the latter, in its generous benevolence, as in its worst nightmares, in fact manufactures educational "successes" and exclude at the same time the risk of thought which is always elsewhere than within the positive limits of the regulated games of truth well ordered by the heaviness and amnesias of the day[27].
[1]Jean Piaget (and collab.). Language and thought in children. Neuchâtel, Paris: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1924; Six studies of psychology. Geneva: Gonthier, 1964. [2]Gaston Bachelard. The New Scientific Spirit. Paris: Alcan, 1934. [3]John Dewey. Democracy and Education (1916). Transl. : Gérard Deledalle. Paris: Armand Colin and New Horizons, 1990. [4]Sigmund Freud. Three essays on sexual theory. Transl. : P. Cotet, F. Rexand-Galand. Complete Works, VI. Paris: PUF, 2006. [5]GWF Hegel. Preface to the Principles of the Philosophy of Right (1821). Transl. J.-L. Vieillard-Baron. Paris: GF Flammarion, 1999, p. 76. [6]I have tried to demonstrate, following Koyré and Foucault, that all of Plato's political work and all of his metaphysics take on meaning in an anthropology of education as the eschatological horizon of ethical life. See: Salim Mokaddem. Educate with Plato. Paris: 2017; Michel Foucault. The courage of truth. The government of self and others II. Classes at the College de France. 1984. Paris: 2012; Alexandre Koyre. Introduction to reading Plato. Paris: 1991. [7]For a critical reading of neuropedagogy, which is very fashionable in certain educational policies, we will read with interest the relevant essay by Michel Blay and Christian Laval: Neuropedagogy. The brain at the center of the school. Paris: Tschann & Cie, 2019. [8]S. Mokaddem. Of childhood and children. Historical ontology and archaeological anthropology of childhood. Dialektikè 3 (2): pp. 23-32 (2015). [9]We will read with interest the always relevant work of the philosopher-historian Henri-Irénée Marrou: History of education in Antiquity. Paris: Threshold, 1948. [10]Michel Foucault's work on alethurgy and the analysis of parrhesiastical discourses (in particular the courses of the years 1983 and 1984) relate to the ancient culture, Greco-Roman, of telling the truth about oneself practiced by the Pythagorean, Stoic, epicureans. In the philosopher's masterpieces, notably Discipline and Punish (1975) and Birth of the Clinic (1963), Foucault shows how categories and disciplines are created in the epistemai, in medicine, pedagogy, prison administration and a type of historical legitimacy claiming truth and a particular type of knowledge authorizing itself from scientific rationality. [11]Read about this l Philippe Ariès: The Child and Family Life in the Old Regime, Paris, Plon, 1960. [12]Joseph Ferrari. The Salaried Philosophers followed by Ideas on the Politics of Plato and Aristotle and other texts. Paris: Payot, 1983. [13]According to Michel Foucault, making sex speak was one of the essential aims of medical science and the bourgeoisie from the 19th century up to Freudian psychoanalysis. See The Will to Know. Gallimard. Paris: 1976. [14]ID., op. cit. [15]As part of a course given in 2022 to undergraduate students from the Faculty of Education of the University of Montpellier, on the sociology of cultural practices of youth, we brought to light the concept of dialectical production of self (auto-poietic) from an appropriation of standardized cultural practices to make them processes of specific subjectivation. It is particularly extremely explicit in the uses of digital technology and the aestheticization of bodies to offer oneself an existential figure close to what we can call a surface for the expression of intimacy in the social body. Thus, any cultural sociology, as a critical anthropology, can only be a phenomenology applied to the total social fact. [16]Jean-Claude Beaune. Technology not found. Research on the definition and unity of Technology based on a few models from the 18th and 19th centuries. Paris: Vrin, 2000. [17]Contrary to a certain vulgate, we date globalization (Weltung) from the end of the 18th century with the universalization in the Kantian sense of the French Revolution of 1789, and globalization with the appearance of the first conflict of industrialized national armies (globalization of the fiduciary economy and polarization of economies around the links between liberalism and the will to know). [18]Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. The Primitive Mentality. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1922. [19]Immanuel Kant. Thoughts on education. Transl. A. Philonenko. Paris: Vrin, 1966. [20]One will read on this subject the beautiful genealogical analysis made by Foucault in La Volonté de savoir, Gallimard, Paris, 1976, of the psy device and psychoanalysis which will center all its attention on the sexuality of the child on the one hand, and by afterwards, on the libido, on the other hand, considered in its more or less repressed history as being the overdetermining causality of human psychic disorders. [21]We refer to the courses of Michel Foucault which preceded the publication of Les Mots et les choses, Gallimard, 1966, to be published shortly by Seuil/Gallimard/EHESS. [22]The work of Françoise Dolto is a total paragon of this. See id. The paths of education. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. [23]Michel Foucault. Keep an eye on and punish. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Jacques Rancière. The Ignorant Master: Five Lessons on Intellectual Emancipation. Paris: 10/18, 2004. [24]We have experimented with philosophical practices in a high school environment with vocational terminal classes, at school and college, and with non-traditional audiences of university philosophy: this has always been done with a concern for critical awakening to thought. without concern for moralization or apologetics. We will refer to our philosophy practices with children and adults at the National and European Theater of the Odeon in Paris and to our philosophical reflection workshops conducted in Brazil, South Korea, Europe and West Africa. and which always start from non-pedagogical and non-moralizing issues but deliberately critical in the most Kantian sense of the term: to dare to think for oneself against oneself and without recourse to the master of the day. [25]We can even remember that secularism at school imposes a ban on interfering in the subjective future of children and adolescents and questioning the forms, figures, styles and methods of philosophizing in such a school system. [26]Michel Foucault. Said and written. Volume 2 and 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1994; Jean paul Sartre. Advocacy for intellectuals? Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Sartre defines the intellectual as being someone “who interferes with what does not concern him” (Ibid., p. 12); Foucault, in his dialogue with Gilles Deleuze in 1976 (op. cit., volume 2) is not very far in 1976 from this committed position, with this nuance that he does not militate in the name of a universal cause but in taking note of its singular practices always situated in a singular context, hence the specificity of its commitments. [27]Remember that philosophy is not a game; children hate being taken for children and they often aim to meet adults who give them meaning and openness to the mystery of life rather than entertainers of educational games and futile pedagogues, friends and Grand Captain , with presumptuous ideas, which risk making them despise the adult world. It is important that the child understands the difference between the seriousness of the real and substantial world of the story (which is not a Sunday of life) and the impotence of their limited freedom, by their ontological and free state , because he immediately saw his being in the world without reference other than his ambient world (Umwelt), constricting (the) everything in themselves. Hegel clearly saw this in the remark in §175 of the Principles of the Philosophy of Law (op. cit., p.
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