Ranciere The Ignorant Schoolmaster

The Ignorant Schoolmaster Five Lesson~in Intellectu~lE mdncz@tion

T~lilnslutedwzth '272 $rzta.od~~cdion, iia; Knisrin Ross

Stanford Uiiiversity Press Stanford, California

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4

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The Society of Conternpr

75 The Law of Gravity, 76. Inequality's Passion, 80, Rhetorical Madness, 83. The Superior Inferiors, 86. The Phiiosopher-King and the Sovereign People, 89. How to Rave Reasonably, 9r. The Speech an the Aventine, 96.

The Emancipator and His Monkey

Ta:anslart6ax9sI neruduct don

L01

Emancipdtory Method and Social Method, r 0 2 . Ernancipation of Men an$ Instructian of the People, 106. Men of Progress, rog. Of Sheep and Men, r r 3. The Progressives" Circle, i 1 7 . On the Heads of rhe Peopte, I 2 2 . The Triumph of the C9ld Master, I 27. Society Pedagogicized, x 30. The Panecastic's Stories, r 3 5 Emancipation's Tornb, I 38.

In The Igtzovaat Schoalnz~is~.erJacques Ranciere reCounts the story of Joseyll Jacotot, a schoolteacher driven intn exile duririg the Kestoratlon who atlowcd that experience to ferment into a rnethod for showing illicerate parents how they themselves could teach cheir rhildren how t.o read. That f acorot's story might have somcthing ro do with the post-I 968 debates about education iri France was not irnrnediately apparent EO most of ehe book's readers when i t appeared in t987. Ilow could the experiences of a man who had lived all the great pedagogical adventures of the French Revolution, arhose own utopian teaching rnethods knew a brief-if worldwide and perfectly serious-flurry of atcention before passing rapidly inro the oblivion Rancikre's book rescues them from-how coufd these experiences "communicate" wir11 ndrninistrators face CO facc with the problerns of educating immigrant North African children in Paris, or with intellectuals intent on mapping the Frenchi schooi, system's conriniied reproductiun of socia! inequalicies? Ranciere's book explairied nothing about the failures OE the school systern;" it entered directly into none of the con'French jnurnalism of the :g%2'r spoke frequently shout "I'Cchec de l'ficnle"; this f8iliire was usually ccttihed by cornpnring the percenrage of Frcnch srudcnts whn atrain rhe lirrrr
temporary polemical debates. tts poiemics, dramatically recounted in the secund half of the book, were rather those of the era of the ignorant schoolmaster, Joseph Jacotot: the eEects of Jacotot's unusual rnethod; its fate at the hands of the reformers and pedagogical institutions it undermined; its effacernent by rhe educationaf poiicies pur into effect, under the auspices of Franqois Guizoc and Vicror Cousin, by rhejuly Monarchy durinp the r 830's. The names of the most listcned-ro tt~eorerical voices on post-'68 education-those of Pierre Boürdieu and Jean-Ctaude Milner-are not mnrioned by Ranciire. Yet the book's. subject was obviously educacion. Kej%A@rds fike "Bessons" and "intellectual," "ignorant" and "schoblm$~ter" appeared, if in a somewhat paradoxical arrangcrnent, i$ its title. And education was again, in the rg80is, under srrutiny i n France. Readers in Prance had difficulty situacing the book, as they have had dificulty, generaily speaking, kceping up with the maverick inteIlectual itinerary of its author. JFor although in 1965, Ranciere published Lire le capitui with hic ceacher Louis Althusser, lie was better known for his celebrated leftist csitique of his coauthor, La Eepn d'Altkxssw (1g74), an4 for the journal he founded the Same year, Rbobes irgiyaes. Trained as a phiiosupher, a professor of philosophy ar the University of Paris, but irnmersed rather unfashionably since 1974in easly-nineteenthcentury workers' archives, Rancihe wrote books that eiudect classification--bds rkiat gave voice to the wild journals of artisans, to the daydreams of anonymous thinkers, to workerpoets and philosophers who devised emancipatory Systems alone, in ehe semi-unreal spaceitime of ehe scattered iate-night moments rheir work schedules allowed them. ' Were these books primarily history? Thc philosophy of history? The history of phiiosophy? Some readers took 1.e Mndtw ignorant to be a fragment of anecdotal history, a curiosiey piece, an archivaf oddity. indicate tiw eelitr nature of French schooling. 11s system of professional i n d vocational "rrxrking." Frnm nearly a quarret to a third of aorking-claaand rural students fail the preparatory Course fcrr rhc b#r, %linst under 3 percent for thosc fr«rn prt>fesslnnalFamtlies.

Educators read it-sorne quice anxiously, given Jacotot's aflirmation thae anynne can learn alone-in the imperative, as a contemporary prescriptive, a kind of suicidal pedagogical howao. A few reviewers read i t on the level ac which i t might, H think, mose jmmpdiately address an Americatt or Bririsfi readership oniy beginning to come to terms with the Iegacics of a decade of Keaganisrn and Thatcherism: as an essny, or perhaps a fable oa parable, that enacts an extraordinary pfiilosophical meditatisn on equality. Bouidieu and the Nem~S~ciology The singular history of each national collectivity pIays a considerabte role in thc probiems of education. Though thti Engfish translarion appearc in very different conditions," i t may bc useful to begin by discussing rhe book's French context, a context still profoundly marlced by the turbulencc of the student uprisings of May '48 and by the confusions and disappoinrments, the reversals and desertions, of the decade that followcd: rhe a13 but total collapse of the Parisian intelligentsia nf the Left, the "end c>fpolitics" amid the triumph of sociology. For it was perhaps as a reacaion to the unexpectedness of tile May uprisings ehae the 1970's favored the eiaboration of a number of social seismologies atid above all energized sociologicaf teflecrion itseIP: ehe criticism oF institutions and superstruceures, of the multiform power of domjnation. In the wakc of the patitical failure of '58,che social sciences awoke to the study of power: ro the New Philosophcrs' self-prctmotional media rakeover, to Michel Foucaulr, buc most imporcantiy, perhaps, to rht sociology of Pierre Bourdieu-the enormous influcnce of whose work would, given the timet lag and ideology of translation, begin in earncst in the English-speaking wodd only in the early rg8o's. No less chan the New Philosophers, Bourdieti 'In rhc Unirrd States today. fur cxarnplr, argumentr about equaliry invariably tilrn nn rhc cubject of tace-not surprisingty in ehe nrtiy majoi industrtal narion bi~itron a Lrgacy o f <Jorncsric slaucry.

could be said to have profited from both the success and the faifure of the May movement, rhe first granting his work the energy and posture of critique, the second reinforcing in it the grauitational pul1 06 scructure. If Bourdieu's work kiad little serious impact on rnethodological debates arnong professional sociologists, its effect on hiscorians, anthropologists, professors of French, educational reformers, art histarians, ghetco high schooi teacheas, and popular journalists was widespread. Hn the introduction CO L'Enzpire dtl snczalogue (1984)~a collection of essays edired by Ranciere and che Rkvolfes logiq~tescoltective, the authors attrfbute the extraordinary success of Bourdieu's tl-iernes oF reyroduction and Jistinction-.the phenornenon of their being, so to speak, in everyone's head-to tbe simple fact that they aiorked, which is to say that they offered the most thorough philosophy of thc social, the one [hat best explained to the most people the theoretical and political signification of the last twenty years of their lives. Bourdieu Iiad produced, in other words, a discourse enrirely in lteeping with his time, a time that cornbined, in the words of the editors, "the orphaned fervor of denouncing the system with the disenchanted certirude of its perpetuityVM2 Before May 1968, steeped in ehe theorerical and political atnosphere of the Althusserian battle for revolutioriary science against ideology, Bourdieu andJean-liaude Passcron published Les Hirztisrs ( 1964)~an analysis of the University thae helped fuel the denunciatiori of the insritution by showing it to be entirely absvrbed in the reprduction oß unequal social structiires. The posr-May dissipacion of hopes for social change, however. served onty EO amplify the influencc of ehat work,,and particularly of its theoretical sequets, Ld Re,b~odttctinv(1970)and La Distincrian (1979).jBourdieu's structuralist rigor with a Marxist accent permitted an exiiaustive interpretivc analysis uf class ciivision and irs inscriptinn-minutely cacalogucd i i i the tiniest details of posture or daily behavior-an analysis that could carry on an existence entirely divorced frorn the practical hy-

pothescs of Marxism or the na'fveres of hope for social transformation. I t al tonred, Rkjoites iogiqlrar argued, "tlie denunciation of' borh the mechanisrns of domirtation and ihe iilusions of liberarion."" Ranciere, in his own critical contribucion to the volurne, attacked Bourdieu and ehe new socio1ogy as the latest and most influential form of a discourse deriving its authority from the presumed nalvetk or ignorance of its objects of srudy: in tlie realm of educarion, rhe milirant instructors in Lia Repuodrrt-rioa who need the iegitirnacy nf the system's atithority to denounce ihe arbitrariness of that lcgitimacy; an$ the working-clasc students excluded frorn the bourgeois System of lavors and privileges. whn r40 not (and cannot) understand rheir exclusion. By tracing the Passage frorn Lei N&itiers to La Reprodzicfion, Ranciere uncovered a logic whereby the social critic gains by showing democracy iosing. Xt was, far exampte, afi too obvious, he wrote, co say thet working-class yoiith are aIrnosr entirely excluded from the university System, and that their cultural inßeriority is a resuit. OE rheir econarnic inferiority. The sociotogisr attained the level of "science" hy prnviding a tautology whose systemic workings, veiled to the agencs rrapped within its grip, were evident ro him aione. The perfect circle, accordirlg so Ranciere, was made "via two proposicions": I . XVorking-cLass youth nre cxciuded from the Lrniversity berairse they are uriaware of the true reasons 6i,r which they are excludrd iLes

H~Y?F/~~Y). 2. Their ignorance of rhe true reasons for which ehey are excludcd is a striicturai effect produced by the vcry existence of tRe system that

exc ludes them (tß.Rep~od~tction). '

The "Bourdieu effect" could be surnmed up in this perfect circle: "they are excluded because they don't Icnow why they are excluded; and they don't know why they are excluded because they are excluded."Qr better: 1.

nized.

The system rcproduces iss exisrence because i t goes unrecog-

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Trunsluror's En/vodz~crion

2 . The system brings about, rhroitgh rhe reproductiori uf ics istence, an effect «f misrecagnition,"

ex-

By rehearsing this tautology, the sociologisr ylaced himself "tn the position of eternal denounccr of a system granted the ability to hide itself forever from its agents": not only did the sociologist see what teacher (an$ student) did not, tie saw it beiaase the teacker and student couid not. Wasn't the ultimate concern evinced by the logic oF the new soclology, Rancierc suggested, that of reuniting ics reaim, legitimating its sptcificity as a Xience through a naturalizing objeccification cif rhe other? t

Pedagog ical Re forms The sociologicai theories of Bourdieii and Passeron offered something for everyone. k r the enlightetied reader, tho disabused Marxist, they oKered the endkessly renewable p l e a s ~ ~ r e of Iucidity, the fris~nnof demystification and the unvciiing of the clockwork rnechanics of a.functionaiisrn usually reserved for crhe structuralise interpretation of fiction. But for the progressive educator they offered ehe justification for a series of atrempts to reform the social inequiries o f thc schoot systemand this especially aftcr Franpis Mitterand and the socialists wcre e1ected in 198 I . At the levei of govesnmental education policy, the Mitterand adniinistration was riven by two warring idrological tendencies, ernbodied in the persons who strccessively occupied the position of Minister of Educarion, AIain Savary and Jean-Pierre Chevenemerit. Savary, imbueti with sornething of the spontaneous, libertarian ethos of May '68 and with the heady early rnurnents of enacting the socialist agenda, saw his rnission as that of zeducing, through a series of reforms, the inequalities diagnosed by Bourdieu and Passeran. If petit-bourgeois instruceors, intenc on capitafizing On the dist.inreians conferred on them by their knowltdge were, as Bourdieu and Passeron argued, complacently reproducing the cultural models that acted to select "inheritors" and Legitimste the sociai inferiority of rhe Jispos-

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sessed, thcn, Savary's refnrrners argurd, a new educacional commanity must lie escablished: one based on undoing the rigid srratificacion of scholars anci rheir knowledge-a kjnd of leveling at rhe top--and crearing aconvitriat, open, egalicarian atmospltere in the schools, which would be attentivc eo citl"whole personafity" of the child. Savary, for instanre, favored a compensatory acritude to unequal opporcuriity. H e had "priority zones" designated that saw supplemenrary funding, extra reaching positions, and speciaily designed curricula established in elementary schvols an$ high schools situared in poor neighborfinods. When Savary's sucressor, Chevencment (currenrly M~nistcr of Defense under Mitteraricif, came ro power in 1984,he announced a halt to such atrempcs at egalicarian reforrn. Under the watchword of "repuMican elitisrn," Chevenement underscored the imperatives of rechnoiogical modernization arid cornpetition for Frnnce in a period of worldwide economic crisis. Advocating a rerurn to the Encyciopedist, rationalist, Enlightenrnei~tprinciples of Jules Ferry and the Third Republic, Iie called for che restoration of gramrnar, rigici examinacioris, civic instruction--a kind of curricular "back t » basics," and a return to the rhetoric of selection t l ~ a tso long characterized French schoaiing. That a violent poIemic crrncerning the values of education should enipt in the journalisrn c;f thtt midigb'o's-a moment of profound general anxiety about the quest i m of French "identicy" in the face of rising irnrnigration--was not surprising. But ehe terms of tAe debace were all tocl farniliar, as were thc polarizcd positions thac resuired: che moie Rousseauist disciples of Savary arguiitg that even a "repubIican" elitisrn could lead only to the excliisioti and marginalitation of an important pcrceittageof French youtii; the "Enlightenmcnr'" fotlc~wersof Chevenemenc arpuing thar a socialist education system must be rarional and scientific, in intellecrual circles, the sornewhat brutal transition from the warm bath oF Savary to the science of Chw2nemelit was facilitated bu the piihlication in r984 nf che linguist Jean-CLaude

Milner's controversial polemic, De I'hb. {Milner appeared an the popular French Iiterary television show "Apostrophes" co taik about his book and was invited by ChevPnement to thc ministry to discuss his ideas on education.) Milner attributed all the ills of the French systeni to a plot launched against knowledge by a "triple alliance" of sringy administracors, hasriiy accredired garvenu high school. teachers, and weil-intended reformers bent on advancing something they called "pedagogyV-what for Milner amounted co nothing more than the ernpty science af teaching how t a teach, These pseudo-. progressive advocates of the vaguely religious and virtuous vocationof pedagogy produced, according to Milner, a purely parasitic discourse: reform after reform whose ends lay in sarrificing true scholarly research and passion for a "convivial schootroom atrnosphere." Not the least provocarive of his assercions u7as tbat a teacher did not have to like children to be a good teacher. Hearkening back approvingly CO the rigors of the Third RepubIir, he argued chat schools and teachers should dispense with xnodeling the "whole person'aad view cheir task instead sirnply and unequivocably as that of transmitting knowledge, as "insrructing," not "educaring." The unequal teiation between wacher and student was not to be dismantled but rather celebtated, for in its inequafity, as in thar of psychoana.lyst and patient, fay the key t o success. inequaiity produced in the student the desire to know. True equality in schooling meant transmitcing the same knowledge ro each student. fn his review of Milner's book,' Ranciere conciirred with the Linguist's frank characterization of the reformist programs as "obscurantist" in their assumprion that the b e ~ cway ro reduce inequalities in the realrn of formally transmitted knowledge was. to cut back on knowledge itself; "tacist" in thrir supposition tliat rhe children of the working class-and especially of immigrants-should be provided with a less "abstract" or "cultural" curriculum; and "infantilizing" in their ideofogy of cchool as a vasr, vaguely maternal enterprise b s e d on "nurturing." But the solution to afl this was not, RanciPte argued, a

return to some norion of pure, scientific transrnission a la Jitles Ferry, fot such a thing had never existed, Wasn't schooling under the Third Republic tainted by, if not obsesscd with, a hygienic project of moral formarion? The terms af rhe debateRousseau vs. Ferry--were misleading. Equalicy rnight reside in reaching the same thing to everyonc, bur it was simply not true that every child in France now-or ai any time in che pasthad a right tuparticipate in ttie comrnunity of knowledge. Sirnilarly, Milner's notir)n of pure scholarly passion, Ranciere suggested, masked the interests of rhe arisrocrats uf education, the mandarins ac the top of the universiry and granc-funding hierarchies, whose concern Bay in preserving, in the Face of a rising tide of hastiIy accredited instructors, rhe traditional priviIcges of' the possessors of culture.

The Lesson of Althusser Mibner and Ranciere shared a scudent activist p s t , a friendship, a ttacher-Louis Althusser-anJ a theoretical formatiori; cwenty years previously, they had bot11 belongcd tu the Union des Errldiants Chimmunistes, the Earnous "cercle d'lJlm'? the srn2-311 group of young theorists including Etienne Balibar, Pierre Machcray, jacques-Alairi Miller, and Rdgis Debray, who artcnded Althusser's early seminats on Marx a t rhe Ecole Normale. RanciPre and Milner were among the signatories elf thc first-mimeographed-iss~ze of the group's journal, the C u h i e ~ ~ Mdvxisiros-LettinisteJ, an issue whose title, "Thc Function of Th@oreticai Formation," reveais its aurhors' eaxly preoccupation with questjons of education and the stacus of intellectual disCourse. A vast historical chasm separares Milner's De I'icole from "Tlie Function of Theoretical Formation"--a cttasm filled with the rnomrintous political defeat af Euroyean worker movemencs in France, Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Spain; the defeat of Althusserianism icself 011 the barricades uf Map; the Right's recuperation of Way an$ its anarcho-libertarian icieology for ttie

Free Matket; and the virtual suppression of historical matesialism in Prance after r97-3 at the hands of the inteflectual currents of the New Pkilosophy and post-struccuralism. And yet in cerrain of Mifner's pronouncements about education, about questions of autkarity and equality, for instance, an echo of che sld master's voice, that of Louis Althusser, can be heard: "TRe function of teaching ," Althusser wrote in I 964, "is to transrnit a determinate knowledge to subjects who do not possess this knowledge. The teacking situation thus rests ora tRe abscalute condition of gn ineqi~diitybetween d knawledge aPrcl a nonknowledge."8For Milner, as fot Altliusser, ehe fundamental pedagogical relation is the one berween knowledge and ignorante. The same histoticai chasm separates Ranci&reis Le Iaifar"lmtgatorunt from his La I,epn d'Aitbrisrer, but Ranci&re's subject-education, or more bxoadly, thc sratus of those who possess knowledge versus rhe Status of those who don't--and orientation toward authority temain unchanged; h t h books, in fact, announce thernselves as "lessons," By writing La Lern d'Aiirthuf~er,Rancitre performed what he called "the first clearing of the terrain" for the kind of reflecrion that has preoccupied him ever since: the consideration nf the phiiosophical and historical relations between knowledge and rhe rnasses. Althusserianism, in Lu Lepn d"Althusser, emerges firsr and foremost as a theory of education. For Kanciire, Althusser's only political-in the strict sense of the wotd-intervention occurred during the early moments of student unrect, when a controversy regarding higher education arose between the student union (UNEF) and the Communisc Party. Student discontent had begun at that pnint t o fwus on the form.r nf the traosmission of kraowledge-the pedagogical relation of magisterial ptofessdrsand docile students-as weil as its ends: forming the future auxiliaries of the bourgeoisie. Already in ~ h eariy e 196o's, students had begun tu question the arbitrariness of examinations and the ideology of individual 'research. In thesc ciarly, tentative efEOrts-their slogan was "La Sorbonne aux etudiantsl'---politics apyeared in a new forrn: in the questioning of-

knowledge and its refation tu political power and i n the introduction of a new line of division arnong ineellectuats betwecn rhe producers and the consumcrs of knowledge. Althusser's intervention was swift and cfear. In an article entitled "Problemes 4tudiants" (1964), he uurlined the correct priorities for Lornmunist students. They must first devclop their knowledge of Marxism-Eeninicm and thcn conduct scienrifir analyses thae would yield objective knowledge of the University. What should matter to biarxists was less the form-the pedagogical relation in which knowledge was disseminated-tilan "the qualiry of knowledge itsclf." Their task must be that of "discovering new scientific knowledge capable of illuminating atid critricizing the overwhelrning illusions in which everyone is imprisoned," and tlte privilegcd vehicle for perforrning this task. was individiial research. The real tocus of dass division in che University was not in the inequitable relations between teachers and students, but in the contenb of the reaching: "it is by the very nature of the knowtedge that it imparts to students that the bourgeoisje exerts . . . the profoundest influence over them." ?For Rancikre, the Atthusserian concepr of science--in fact, the sciencelideofogy distinction itself-had ultimately nu other function than that of justifying the pure being of knowledge, and, rnore important, of justifying che eminent dignity of the possessorc of chat Irnowlerige. For if science (theory) forms a n enclave of ffeedom in a world of ideologicai enslavement, if science beiongs to the inrellectuals-ehe macters-and the critique of bourgeois content is resesvcd for those who alreadv know, then there is only one way for students ro criticize their masters' knowledge from thr point of view of ctass, and that is co k c o m e their peers. ff everyone dwells in iilusion (ideology), then the solution can oniy come from a kind of rnuscular theotetical heroism on the part of the aone theorist. Ranciere recounted what was for him the most graphic illustration of this: Althusser's need tet deny the antiauthoritarian May rcvalt as i t was happerling in order to pretend lacer to "discover," through

This archival, narrative work has run parallei to--and enrer-tains a cruciat dialogue with-rhe second, mote potemical and discursive front: Ranciere's critique of the claims of bourgeois observers and intel lectuals (philosoptiers, sociai historians, New Philosoptiers, sociologists~to know, and thus "speak for" or explicate, the privileged other ofpoiiricai modernity, rhe worker. " Rarici6re's cricique of the educational theories uf Bourdieu, Althusser, and Milner shows them ro have at least one thing in common: a Hesson in inequaliey. 'ff with inequality, proves it, and by proving it, in the end, is is 1. Seen as the reproduction of incquality?~ourdieu)or as the potential insrriimcnr fur the redsicrion oE inequality (Savary), the effect is the säme: that oferecring and rnainraining ttie distance separating a future reconciliation fmm a present inequalirp, a knowledge in che oEng fiom tnday's intcllectual impoverishment-a distance discursively invented and reinventerl so that it may never be abolished. The poor stay in their place. The Same temporal and spatial distance separates the t>edakogur &om ttle studerrr as separates thc "explicator of rhe socialthe workes.

chance and solitary research, and to propose as a risky hypothesis, whar the mass student action had already revcalcd tu everyone-the function of the school as an ideological apparatus of rhe state.' Confronced with the events of May, the logic of Althusserianism reacts according to the predictable ternporality of the olae z~rhok n u t ~ ~May f . '68 was not the proper mornent Ernpirical politics an$ theory must be dissociated frorn each other, and the position that enacted rhat dissociatisn was thar of rlle educacor-he who k n ~ w show to wait) liow to guard his distance. pMlosophy how to rake the time of iheory. The last re~oar@~of is to eternalize the division of lahot rhat grants-,~tits place.'"

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The Pracrice of Equality If che phiiosophical traditiori is itself a product of the division between mental an$ manual labor, then w h a ~authoriry is CO be granted rhe restimony of this tradieion? And particularly w1-ICIIphilosophy Sets itself rhe task, as ir delights in doing, of speaking for those whose presumed ignoranae grants it its domain? Since Ld Lefon d;4I~husser,Ranciere's investigation of the origin, continuation, and accasional subversion of the hierarchical division of head and hand has been lau-nched on two fronts. The first: might L7e calied the archival level, the docurnencing, chronicling, essencially recounting, of the experiences and voices of early-nineteenth-century workers who ";ransgressed the boundaries srit for them": figures both rnarginal and cencral to workers'communities whose emancipacion rook the form of clairning fur chernselves what the middle classes assurned t a be theirs alme, a realm of existente outside rhe one defined by the circle of material necessitp. H e focused on workers who claimed the right to aesthetic conternplation, the tight to dead time-and, above all, rhe right to think, "I took the great gauchzste theme-the relations of inrellectuai and manual work-and put it in reverse: not rhe re-educacion of intellecti~als,but the eruption of negativity, of rhinking, into a social category always defined bv the posirivity of doing,'"'

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de6arriire? What would ir inem to makc equaliry ap~es~~ppo~ztrOn rather ehan a goal, a pvactice rather tlran a reward situated firm1 D i v o r n e disrant future so as to all rhe betrer explain i t r p r e r c J I ni- * . lity? This is rhe lesson providcd by JosephJacocor's ecperience--exphrience in the French Enlightenment sense of borti "experiment" and "experience"-and the 1.essonwhuse plitical and philosophical tirneliness Ranciere affirms by recounting Jacotot's story. All people are equally intelligent. This is Jacotor's startling (or naive?) presupposition, fiis lesson in inieflectual emancipation. And from this starting point (the result o f an accideritill discovery occasioned by ttie peculiar cirrumstances of cxile), Jacotot came to reatize that kn2wledge is not necessary CO teaching, nor explicatian necBarv to i e a r n i n ~ ."Lxplication," heb Grites, "is the rnyth of pedanogy," Rarher tllan elirninating ini

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capacity, explication, in fast, creates it, Ir does this in part by establishing the temporal structure of delay ("a little further along," "a little later," "a few more explanations and you'li see the light") that, wrii tage, would become the whole nineteenth-ceneury myth of Progress: "the pedagogical fiction erected into thc fiction af che whole society," and rhe general infantilization of the individuals who corniose i c . $he pedagogicaI myth divides the worid inta two: t h e w h e ignorant, the rnature and the i~nformed,the capable and t& tdcaoable. IJv the second halt of The lnnarant SckooIpndster, cbe h s -y ofdetay that links the popular classes, the child, and rlae poor wirhin the discourse of rhe repubiican "Mcn of Progress" surrounding Jacoror is all too ciear. The pedagogical ficcicin works by representing inequality iri rerms of velociiy: as "slownecs," "backwardness," "defay." Perhaps this humology oF delay, the whole ternporality of the "lag" that the book exposes, will provide thr rneans f»r readers who have pondererl the forms taken by rhe ideology of prcigrcss sincc Jacotor's time to trace the cnnstellarion (the term is Walter Benjamin's) that our own era fotrns with Jacotor's. For hasn't the pedagogical fiction of our own time been cast on a global scale? Never will the student catch iip wich the tcachet; never will the "developing" nations catch up with the enligheened ,nations, Are cven che critiques of "dependency theory" free of pedagogical rhetoric in their discussions of the Third World? To say this is ro clairn that a reading of The Ignorant Schoolmarter can suggest hrrw roday's much-heralded "democratization" of the globeour own contempomry institucionaliz,aeion and representation of pro.gress---is just the new name for inequality. In The Ignamnt SchooEmaster, Rancikre bas found ehe means ol' illustrating end defendingequaliry that exterids ro the very level of formal risks he has takcn recounting the story. Ir is ahove all the book's formal procedures that have allowed Rancitre t o think the sociai itself in such a disrincely original fasliion. Foe as Benjamin was not alonc in realizing, "the concept of rhe historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the con-

cepr of i t s progression thtough a homogenous, empty time. And a critiqiie of such 3 pragrcssion musc br: thc basis of any criticism of the concept nf progress itself."" The criticjue of Progress, in ather words, rnust intervene at the levet of the progression, rhe speed nr pacing , the gractice of historical writing itself. Viewcd from this perspcctive, rhe gradualist, "additive" notiori of writing history-the slow, reasonecf accun~ulationof clata wich which che hiscrjrian fills an empty, la~mogenous time-begins to bear a distinct resemblancc ro rhc gradual, stcp-by-step acquisitiun of rindersrandiiig throrigh rxplicstion that Jacotot's method so dramatically explodes." If che hisrorian's relation to thc past-and co his or her readers--is not to he onc nf explication, rhen what can ir be? Early writings of rhe Rievoites iogiqt~ejcollective announce its project to be that of crr'ating an "alternative historical rnernory." This, I think, suggests a motivacion akfn to that of Benjamin's to biasr, as he put it, "a unique cxperience of the past" oitt of the "continuum of hisr»ry" foa the purpose of wresting rneaning from the past for the present. Ac the collective put i t : An episodr Frorrt the past inrrrests us oniy inasmuch as i t becomes itri episnde of the present wherein our rhoughts, aciioris, and straregies are decided, . . . Whar interests us is thnr idcas be evcnts, [hat hisrnry be at all rirnes a break, a rupture, ta be inrerrogared anly from the perspecrive of tkie tiere and now, and only pulicically.'' 'Fhe rnotivarion is ctear. But what are die formal nr rhetorical crrategics, what are the wriring practices, that atlow an cpisode from the past to becnrne an episode in ahe present? Xn tiie case of The lg~rordntS c b o o l m ~ t c tfle ~ , story of Jacotot apens atid ends 'Rancierc is in facr Lesi known in rhe IJoircd Stnres ana~ngh~storians.for his pi>lemical interve~irionscnncerning swial history as P a~reticr,and lor bis dpbarrs witl, p~rriciriars ~ c ~ a l hisror~ansovcr the identity dlK! c:?n~ciousnrss11f ihr a r t i s a ~ SEI. . ~sfn'cialty.h i ~~~ r h s n g ~ ei t h Wllliam Sewell, Ir., and Chrisrupher Johoscn iri " T h e hlytli I I tlic ~ Ariisan," tnter~iafrn~rni Lahnr. rnd Ifit.hin(: C/"JI Hi~inyi,2 4 (Fall roHz1. Scr als.3 whnr i s rht n~ijstri>oroughdisctr~rlonn i Rancicrck rclation to tlie practirr nf history, arid of his u~urkin geocral. Donntd R c ~ d inrroi diiction to t h rranslarian ~ 01 La Niiir d#~p~0~66orrtr iN?~hf.* n/ Ltbor, Philadelphia. igllg) In. pnr:anr essays by Ranciere oripinally published III Rhvltrs tngt9ii~iare nwilablc in Yuiisr nf ~ b r Plopte, pd. Adrian Riikin anif R08r.r Thomas ILonilr>r~,1»RR).

withour RanciPre doing. on one level, anything ocher rhan riarrating it. Storytelling then, in and of itself, or recozrnting-orie of the two basic operations of the intel!igence according to Jacotot-ernerges as one of the concrete acts or practices that ver&es equality. (Equality, writes Jacotoe, "is neither givcn nor claimed, it is practiccd, it is verified.") T h e vety act of storyrelling, an acr thar presumes in its interlocutor an equality of intelligente rather than an inequality of knoudedge, posits eqtiality, jusi as the act nf explicacion posits inequaliry. Bur another, inore unusuat effect is created by the narrative style of thc book: a particular kind of uncertkinty that readers may experience concerning the ideneiry of the book's narrator. 'B'he reader, in other words, is not quite Sure where the voice of Jacorot stops and Ranciere's begins, Xanciere slips irtto Jacotot's text, winding around or worming in; his cornmentary concextuali zes, rehearses, reiteraies, dramatizes, elaborates, catitilaurr Jacotor; the effect is orie of a compiex echoing taking place between the author arid Jacocot at the level of voice, as thuugh an enormously sympathccic disciple of Jacotor's had, by soxne time-travel device familiar t o readers of science fiction, rurrjed u p in the twentieth ccntury. 8 n e existential grounding for such an echoing rnay be surmised. Jacocot's rcfatiun to posrRevolurionary France (bis experirnents, in a sense, pro/nn& ehe revolutionary ctiergies o f 1789 inco the France of the r 820's and 1830's) i s doubled by Rancikre's relation to 1968. The two are united by sorneching like a shared lived retation to cycles of hope, then to cycles of discouragernent, and on to the displacement of hope-a scquence that marks the experience of yeriods of revolutionary ferment and their aftirmach, Thac such periodr are also ones of productive ferrnent around the question of education--nr frclnrn~issic~ti-goes withour saying, Bus in the end it is emancipation--not education--thac has drawn Ranciere t o Jacotot. For the reader, rhis narrative uuiicertainty will prove productive, I think, for it has the effecr of facilitating-----crcatingthe means for-the book's (nonexplicic, iinexplicated) intervention

into the prcsent. Without rxplanation, rhe polirical rimeliness of Jacotor's "naivere" is afirrned. For Rancikre, rhis particular boak becomes thc rneans by which his rwo previously separated activities-the arctiival, situated in the past, and the polemical, situated for the most part in the present of contemporary tlieoay-.are merged, a merging ehac in turn con&)i,nn(.isany atcernpt to ctassify thc book generically. Are rhe nineieenthcenrury republican Men of Progress, thc founders of public ediicatii~n,the sociologists of today? Aiid, if so, is rl~chock a satire? Does a sntirist's rage a t the fallen reality of postmodernisn, otir own societp of experts, drive the teci tation of Jncotor's urnpiari experience? I t is certainIy clear, frlr example, that Raneitre's (and Jacrrtot's) distincri.de "unrimefiness" stands in agonistic relacion to the perfect tirneliliess and seamlessr-iess af the "Bourdieu effect," the whoie conternporary sociology of "systems of reprisentation." Can Jacotor anci his series of concrere practices verilying equality he rnarshaled tu do battfe with thc dominant discourse of otir own time, thc discourse 0f a hidden truth and its dernyscificacion bp thr tnaster explicator, the disCourse that asserts tt-iat "cherc is no science but of che hidcien"?'" 7 %Ignnruni ~ Schoa/itzujter forces us to confrnrir what any number of nihilistic, neo-liberal phiiosaphirs would havc us avoiti: th? iounding term of our political mociernity, e q f ~ l i t yAnd . in the face of systematic aetacks on rhe very idea, powerfu1 ideologies that ~vniildrelegate it ro thedustbin of history or to some dimlv radianr futttre, Ranciere places equality-z~zrtf~n/fy-in the preserir, Against the seamlcss science of rhe hidden, Jacotot's story remiiids its that equa1ity turns on anciclier, very different lagic: in division rather than Consensus, in a multipiicity of concrete acts and actual rnoments and situations, sit~iarions that crupt inro the fiction of inegalitarian socicty without thernselves hccorniug institutions. And in this. rny rendering of thc title of the book as The ignormc Schoo/nrnster is perhaps rnisleading, Fc~rJucotot had no school. Equalicy does not, as thry say in FrencR, "faire ecule."

The Igs?ordnt Schou/ma~ter Five Eessons in Inteilecrual Ernancipation

i n 1818, Josep1.i Jacotot, s lecturer in Frencfi literature a t thc Bfnivetsity of Louvain. had an inteflectual advenTUEK.

A long and eventful career should have made h i n irnmune to surgrises: hc had celebrared his nineteenth birthday in 1789. H e was at that time reaching rheroric at Dijon and preparing for a career rn law. In 1792,he served as an artilleryrnan in thc Repi~blicanarmies. Then, under the Convention, he worked successively as instructor for the Bureau of Gunpowder, secretary to the Minister of War, and substitiire for the director of che Ecofe Polytechnique. When he returned t o Dijon, he tsught anatysts, ideology, ancient languages, pure mathematics, transcendent mathematics, an$ law. In March I 8 I 5 , the esreetn of his cuuntrymen made hin1 a deputy in spite of himself. a'he re' turn of the Bourbons fbrced him into exile, and by ehe generosity of the Kiilg of the Netherlands he ohtained a position as ra profssor at half-pay. Joseph Jacotnt was acquainted with the laws vf hospiraiiey and counced on spending some calm days in Louvain. Chance dccided di&tentIy, Thc unassurning lecturer's lessons wcre, in Fact, highly appreciated hy his scudents. Among those who wanted to avail thernselves of him wcre a good number of students who did not speak Prcncl~;but Jnseph Jacacarnt knew no FlernEsh. There was thus nu language in which he could teach them whae ehey sought from hirn Yet hc waneed to re-

spond to their wzshes. 'Ii, do so, the minimal link of a thing 117 cott2tlmon had tobe established beeween himself and ckem. At char time, a bilingual ecircion of Tiiin~aqricwas being published in Brtrsseis.' The thing in cornrnon had heen found, and TeFelemachus made his way into the iife of Joseph Jacotot. I-Ie had the book delivered ro ehe studencs and asked rhern, through an intergrcter, to Iearn rhe French iext with che help of rhe translation. When they had madc i t through the first half of rhe book, he had chem repeac what they had learned over and wer, and rhen todd them to read through rhe rest of the book until they could recite it This was a forrur~atesolution, but ic was also, on a small scale, a phrlosophtcal experirnent in tlie style uf the ones performed during the Age of Enltghtenmenr. AndJoseph Jacotot, in r8t8, remained a man of ttie preccding century. But the experiment excecded his expectations. He asked the srudents who had prepared aq instrucced to write in Prench whar chey thouglit about whar rhey had read: He expected horrendous barbarisms, or maybe a complrce inabiairy ro perform. Wow could these young peupic, deprrved of expianation, understand and resolve the difficiif ties of a Janguage entireiy ncw to them? Mo matter! He had ro lind oiir where the route opened by ihance bad caken rhem, whar had been the resuirs of that desperate ernpiricism, hnd how surprised hc was tu dtscover that che students, Ieft to themselves, managed r h ~ difficulc s step as well as many Frrrich

couid have done! Was wanting alt that was necessary for doing? Were atl rnen virtually capable of understanding what othcrs had done an4 understood" Such was tlie revolution rhar this chance experiment unleashcd in bis rnind* Until chen, he had believed what all con@Penelün's
scientious profecsoxs heiieve: rhat chc important busincss of tiie master is to transmit his knowledge to his students so as to bring them, by degrees, CO his own level of expertise. Like all conscientious professors, he knew chat teaching was not in the slightesr about cramming studencs with knowledge and havirig them repeat ic tike parrots, but he knew equally well that students had to avoid the chance decours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential frorn the accessory. the principle from the conseqtience, gct lost. In short, thc essential act of che master was to e,:xp.izctrte: to disengage the simple ele-. ments d learniag, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with rhe factual sirnplicity that characterizes young and igriorant minds. 7i, teach was to transmir Iearning and form minds simuitaneously, by leading rhose minds, accordirig to an ordered progression, from the most sirnpte to che mosc complex. Dy the reasoned appropriation of knowtedge and the forrnation o l judgment and taste, a student was thus elevated co as high a level as his social destination clemandcd, and he was in this way prepared to make the use of the knowIedge appropriate to that desrinacion: to teach, tu litigate, ot to govern for rhr lettered elire; to invent, design, or make instrurnents and machines for rhe new avant-gardc now hrzpefully to be drawn from tlte elite of the common peopie; and, in ttie scientific careers, for the minds gifted with this partic~ilnrgenius, to make new discoveries. Undoubresily the prvcedures of these men of sciencc would diverge noticeahly from che reasoraed order of the pedagagues. But this was no grounds foi an argumenr agairist thar order. O n the contrary, one must first acquire a solid and methodicai foundation before tRe singularicies of genius could takc flig ht . Post hot , e q r t prnpfer bot-. This is how al! conscientious prufessors xeason. This was how Joseph Jacotot, in his rhirty years at rlhe job, had reasoned and acted. But now, by chance, a grain od sand had golfen inco tlle rnachine. He had given no exptanation c t j his "scudents" on chc tirst elcrnencs of the language. He had not expIained spelling or corsjugations to chem. They had luoked for the French words thae corcesponded to words they icnew and che reasons for their

grammaticak endings by themselves. Thcy had learned to put them together to make, in turn, French sentences by rhemselves: sentences whose speiling and grammar became more and nlore exact as they progressed through the book; but, above all, sentences of writers and not oh schsoichildren. Were the schoollnaster's explications therefore superfiuous? Or, if they weren't, to whom and for what were they iiseful? T h e Explicative Order Thus, in ehe mind of JosephJacotot, a sudden iillumination brutally highiighted what is blindly taken for granted in any system of teaching; the necessity of explication. And yet why shouldn't i t be taken for granted? No onc truly knows anything oeher than what he has understood. And for cornprehension to take place, one has ro he given an explicarion, the words of thc rnasrer rnust shatter the silence of the taught tnaterial. And yet that logic is not wifhoui ccrtain obscurities. Consider, for example, a book in the hands of a student. The book is made u p of a series crf reasonings designed to make a scudent understand sorne material. But now the schoolmaster Opens his rnouttl to explain the book. H e makes a series of reasonings i n order to explain the series of reasonings that constitute the book. But why shauld rhe book need such help? Inscead of paying for an explicator, couldn't a father siAply give the book in his son and the child understarid directfy che reasonings of the book? And if he doesn't understand them, why would he bc any mare iikety to understand che reasonings that would explain to hirn what Iie hasn't undersrood? Are rhose reasonings of a different nature? And if so, wouidn't it be r~ecessa~y to explain the way in which to understand them? So the logic of explication catls for the princi y le of a regression ad infinitum: there is nu reason for the redoubling of reasonings ever ro stop, What brings an end to the regression and gives the system i t s foundation i s sirnply that the explicator is the sole judge of the point when the explication is itself explicated, Eie is the sote judge of that, in itself, dizzying qucstioil:

has che student understood the reasonings thar teach hirn to understand thc rcasonings? This Is what tlle master has ovcr che facher: how could the father be certain that tbe child has understood the bonk's reasonings? Wtiac is missing for the father, whar will always be missing in the trio he forms with the child and the book, is the singuiar art of the expiicator: thc arc of 4istu~zre.Tke mastcr's sectet 1s to know how to recoanize the distancebetween the taught material and the person being iqm u , the dzstancc also hetween learning and understandipg. m i i c a t o r sets up and abolishes this discance-deploys i t and reabsorbs it in the fullness of his speech. This privileged scatus of speech does not suppress the regression ad infinitum without instituting a paradoxical hierarchy.

._............_I_*

Mow can wc understand this paradoxical privilege of speech over writing, of hearing over sight? Wliat relationship thuc exists between the power of speech and thc power of the rnaster? This paradox irnrnediately gives rase to another: the u!ovdc the child learns best, chose whose rneaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master expticator, well before any tnaster explicaeur. According to ehe unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships,what all human chiidren tearn best is whar no rnaster can exptain: rhe mother tongue. \Te speak to ihem and we speak around them, They hear and retain, irnicate and repeat, make mistakes and correct thernselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at eon young an age for explicators to begin instrucring them, they are almost allregardless of gender, social condition, arad skin cotor-abie tn urderstand and speak the language of rheir parenrs. And only now does this child who learned to speak through his own intelligente and through instructors who did not ex-

all, he will say, the studenr must understand, and for that wr must explain even hetter. Such is the conccrn of rhe enlightened pedagogue. does the iittle ane understand? He doesn'c understand. I will find new ways to explain it to him, ways more rigorous in principle, more attractive in form-and I will vetify rhat he has understood. A noble concern. Unfortunately, it is just this Iittie word, this slogan of the enlightened--understand-that causes all the trouble. Br is this word [hat brings a halt tu the novemcnt of reason, that desttoys its confidence in irself, tfiac diseracts rt by breaking the worid of intelligence into two, by installing, the division between the groping animal and tke learned lirtle man, between common sense and science. From the marnent this slogan of duality is pronounced, all the perfecting uf the w q s of mnkie nvdeirtuod, that grcat preoccupation of men of methods and progressives, is progress roward stulti fication. The child who recites undct the threat OE the rod obeys the rod and that's all: he will apply his intelligence to samething else. But the child who is explrlined to will devote his inteiligence to the work of grieving: tu understanding, that is to say, to understanding that he doesn'e understand unle5s he is explained to. H e is ne, longer suhmitting to the rod, but rarher to a hierarchical world of intelligence. Fnr rhc rest, like theother chiid, he doesn't have to worry: if the solution tu the probiem is too dificulc to pursue, he will have cnough intelligence eo npen his eyes wide. The master is vigilant and patient. H e wilf sce that che child isn't following him; he will gut llim back on track by explaining things again. And thus rhe child acquires a new intelligence, that of che master's explicgtions. Eater he can be an exylicatur in turn. He possesses ehe eyuipment. But he will perfect it: he will be a man of progress. Chance an$ Will So goes the world of rhe explicnted expticators. So would ir iri the

have gone fot Professor J a c ~ t o rif chance hadn't put him

prescnce of a fnct. And Joseph Jacotot believed that all reasoning should he based on faccs and cede place to them. We shouldn't conclude frorn this thar he was a materialist, O n tlic conttary, like Descartes, who proved movement by walking, but also like his very royalisr and very religious contemporary Maine de Biran, he corisidered the fact of R mind a t work, acring and conscious of its activity, to he more certain than any material thing. And thjs was what it was a!l about: thefutt zum that his studeslts hudbed~nedro speak and to write in Prench without the aid of explicatiori. He hpd conmunicated nothing ro them about his science, noexplications of the roots and flexions oF the French Ianguage. He hadn't even proceeded in the fashic.tri of those reformer pedagogtles who, like the preceptor in Rousseau's Emzle, misled their students the bettet to guide them, arid who cunriingfy erect an obstaclc course for the studencs 1-0 Icarn tu negotiate themselves. He had iefc them alone wirh rhe text by Fkneion, a translation--.not even interlinear like a schoolbook-and their will to Jearn French. He had only given them the order to pass throtagh a forest whose openings änd clcarings he himself had not discovered. Neccssity had constrained him to leave his inteiligence entirely out of tlie picpure-that mediating intelligerice of the rnaster that relays the prinred i ncel tigence of written words to che apprentice's. And , in one felI svroop, he had suppressed the irnaginary dist-aricethat U the ptinciple of pedagogical stultificarion. Everyrhing had peeforce been piayed out bctween the inteliigence of Fenelon who had wanted ca make a particulat use of the French language, rhe intelligence of ehe translacor who had wanted so give a FIernish equivalent, and the inteiligence of the apprentices who wanred ro learn French. And it had appeared thaa no oeher inteffigence was necessary. Wirhour thinking about it, he bad made them discover this thing chat he discovered with them: e thcm, are oof the same nature.

page, no faise bottom &hatnecessitates thc work of an otber intclligence, that of the explicator; na language of the master, no language of the language whose words and sentences are abie to speak the reason of the words and sentences of a text. The PLemish sriidents had furnished the proofi to speak about Tklirncdqrde thcy had at their disposition oniy the words of Tllkwaque. Fenelon's sentences alone are nccessary to understand F6neton's sentences and to express what one has understod about rhem. Learnjng and understanding are two ways of expressing the Same act of translation, There is nothing beyond texrs except thc will to erpress, that is, to tramlate. If they had understood the language by learning Fenelon, it wasn't simply through the gymnastics of comparing the page On the left with rhe page on the right. Ic isn't the aptitude for changing colurnns that Counts, but rather the capacity to say what one tkinks in the words of others. If they had learned chis frorn Fenelon, that was because the acr of Hikneton the writer was irself one of translation: in order to translate a political lesson i'nto a legendary narrative, Fenelon eransforrned into che French of Iiis century Homer's Greek, Vergil's Latin, and the language, wise or naive, of a hundred other texts, frum children's stories io erudite history. He had applied COthis double translarion rhe same intelligence they empioyed in their turn to recount with the sentences of bis book what they thaught about his book. But the intelligence that had allowed them to learn the French in Tdidtidape was the Same rhey had used to Iearn their mother tongue: by observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by retacing what they were trying to know to what they already knew, by doing and reflecting about what chey had done. They moved along in a manner one shouldn't move alonp-the way children mom, blindly, fipuring out riddles. And the quescion then became: wasn't it necessary CO overturn the adrnissible order of intellectual valcies? W'asn't thae shame6u1 rnethod of the tiddle the true movement of human intelligence taking pos3ession of its own power? DtJn't tits proscrip-

tiori indicate above all thfi will to divide the world u t inteIIigence into two? The advocatec of rnethod oppose rhe nonmethod af chance ro that of proceeding by reason. Bur what tliey Want to provc is given i n advance. They suppose s little nnima! who, burnping into things, explores a world that he isn't yet ablr tu see and will only discern when they teach him ro do so. Hiue the human child is first of ail a speaking being. The child who repeats die words he hears and the Plernish student "lost" in his TPIimqrir are not proceeding hit ot miss. All their effurt, all their explorarion, is strained toward this: someone has addressed words to them that they Want to recognize and re.spond to, not as students or as learned men, but as peuple; in the way you respond to someone speaking to you and not to scrmeone examining you: under the sign of equality. The fact was there: they had learned by themselves, wirhout a mascer explicator. What has happeriecl once is thenccfurch always possible. This discovery could, after all: overturn the principfes of theprofes~orJacotot. Butjacotot rhc inan was in a bettet position to recognize what great variety can be expected from a human being. His father had been a burcher before keeping the accounts of his grandfather, the cnrpenter who had sent his grandsori to college. He hintself had been a professor of' rhetoric wheri he had answered the call to arnls in X792 I-Bis companions' vore had made him an artiiiery captain, and he had showed himseif tn he a remarkable artillerytiian. In r 793, at the Bureau oF Powders, this Latinist became a chemistry instructor work- , ing coward the accelerated forming of workers being sent cverywhere in the territory to apply Fourcroy's discoverics. At Fourcroy's own establishrnent, he had bccome acquainted with Vauquetin, the peasant's son who had trained liimself to be a chemist without the knowledge of bis boss. He had seen yoilng people arrive at the Ecole Polytechnique who haci heen selected by improvised commissions on the dual basis of their liveiliness of rnind and their patrintisrn. And he had seen them become very good mathematicians, less through tlle cafcuIations Monge

and Lagrange explained to them than through those thar they performed in front of them." He himself had apparently profited from his administrative functions by gaining competence as a mathernatician-a competence he kad exercised later at the University of Dijon. Similarly, he bad added Mebrew ro the ancient languages ke taughc, and composed an Euay an Hebvezo Gra~naar.He believed, God knaws why, [hat that language had a future, And hnally, he had gained for himself, reluctantly but with the greatest firmness, a competence at being a reprcsentative of the people. In shott, he knew what the will of individuafs and the peril of the counery could engender in rhe way of unknown capacities, in circumstances where urgency dernanded destroy ing the stagcs of expl icative progression. He thought that this exceptionai state, drctated by the nacion's need, was no different in principle from the urgency that dictates the exploraeion of the wortd by the child or from that other urgency thae constrains clte singular path OE Learned men and inventors. Tkcough the experiment of che child, the learned man, and rhe revolutionary, thc rnethod of chanca so successfully practiced by the Flemish students reveaied its second secret. The merhod of equality was above all a method of tkie will. One could iearn by oneself and without a master explicator whea one wanted to, propelled by one's own desire or by che tonstraint of the situation. T h e Emanciparory Master

In this case, thac constraint had raken the form of the command Jacotot had given. And it resuited in an important consequence, no langer fot rhe students buc for rhe master. The students liad Iearned without a master explicator, but not, for all that, withdut a master. They didntt know how before, and 'Antoine Fran~oisFourcrcy l17))-180')), chemist and polirician. participatcd in the esrablishment of a rarional nomenclarure in chernisrry. Thc principal work of the mathematician Joseph Louis dc tagrange ( 1 736- I 8 r 3) was che Mdraniq~iaaanalyfiqte ( r 788). Thc mathematicinn Gaspard Monge (~7~6-1818) h+ed creatc the E.colc Normaie and foundcd the Ecole Po1yrcchnique.--~RANS.

now they knew how. Therefore, Jacotot had taught them sornething. And yet he had cornmunicared nothing to them of bis scierice. So it wasn't the master's science [hat the scudent learned. His mastery lay in the cornmand h a t had enclosed the students in a closed circle from which thcy aione could break out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence tograpple wich that of the book. Thus, the two functions chac link rhe practice of the master explicator, that of the savant and that of the master had been dissociated. The ewo faculties in play during the act of tearning, nainely intetligence and will, had ttiereforc also been separated, IiLerated from each other. A pure relationsllip of will to will had been established between master and student: a relationship wherein the master's domination resuifred in an entirely liberated reirationship between the intelligence of the studenr and that of the book-rhe intelligence of the book that was also the thing in common, the egalitarian inteifectual link between rnascer and student. This device allowed the iurnkzlPdcatEFQs'ies of the pedagogical air to be sorted oiit, . . C I' kc&on to be precisely defined. There i sr& -S one incelligence is subordinated to another. A person-and a cFGId i n partrcuiar----may need a rnaster when his own wilt is not strong enough ta set hirn on track and keep him therc. But that subjection is gurely one of w 1-.i Ir becomes stultification when it links an intelliaencc to another intellieence. -. ril In rhe act of teaching arad Iearning there are two wills and two btgclligences. We wild. cali their coincidcnce sttilttfi~tion.In the experimental situation lacoror created, the stutlent k a s linked to a will, Jacotoc's, and to an intelligence, the book's-the two entireiy distinct. We will cail the known and maintained dif-

of ali pedagogies. The pedagogues' pracrice is based on the oppsition between science and ignorance. The merhods chosen to render the ignorant person learned may differ: srricc or gentle

methods, traditional or modern, active or passive; the efficienc): of these methods can be cornpared. Frorn rhis point of viciw, we could, ai hrst giance, compare the speed of facotnt's srudents with the slowness of traditional methocis. But in reality there was nothing to cornpare. The confrontation of mechods presupposes a minimal agreement on the goals of the pedagogical act: ehe transmission of the master's knowledge to the students. Buc jacotot had rransmitted nothing. He had nor used any rnethod. The method was purely the student's. And whether one learns French more quickly or less quickiy is in itself a matter of iittle consequence. The comparison was no longerb+~weeo rnethodr but rarher between two uses of intelligence and two conceptions of che inreltectual order. The rapid route was not tha@ a better pedagogy. It was anorher route, that of liberty-that route thar Jacotor had experitnented with in the arrnics of Year 11, the fabrication of powders or the founding of the Ecole Polvrechnique, tlie route of liberty respnding to ttiie urgency of tlie peril, but jusi as much to a confidence in the intellectual capacity uf any human being . Benearh t he pedagogical relation of ignoranre to science, the more fitndamentajl phiiosophic-al relation of stulrificaeion to ernancipation rnust be rccognized. There were thus not two bur four terms in play. The act of learning could be produced according to four variously combi ned deterrninations: by an einancipatory master or by a stuttifying oae, by a learned master or by an ignorant one. . The Last propositian was the most difficult to accept. It goes without saying that a scientist mighr do science without explicating it. Bur how can we adrnit thnt an ignoranr person rnighr induce science in another? Even Jacotoc's experiment was ambiguous because of his position as a professor of French. But since it had at least shown thar it wasn't the master's knowledge that insctucted the student, thcn noching psevented the masier ftoni teaching something other tlian his science, something he didn'r know. Joseph Jacotor appiied kimself to varying the experiment, to regeating on purpose what chance had once produced. He began to teach two subjects at which he was notabfy

incompetent: painting and the piano. Law students would iiave But thc University of Louvain was aiready worried about rkis exrravagant lectitrer, for whom srudents were deserting rhe magisrerial courses, in favor of coming. euenings, to crowd into a much ron srnall room. iir by only two candles, in order to hear: "I must reach you that f have norhing ro teach you."' Tlie authority rhey consulted thus responded that he saw no point in calling this teaching. Jacotot was experimentiny, precisely. with rhe gap between accrediration and act. Ratliei than teaching a l a a course in Frenrh, hc taughi rhe students ro litig~cein PIemi~h. Thev litigated very weil, but he still d~dn'cknow Fiernish.

liked hirn to be given a vacant chair in their faculry

#@\I

T h e Circle of Power The experitnenr seerned to hirn suficienr to shed light: one can teach what one doesn'c know if ~ h student e is emancipated, that is to say, if he is obliged to use his own incelligence. The master is he who enctoses a n intelligence in the arbicrary circle from which i t can o d y break out. by becoming necessary ro irself, 2% emancipate an ignorant person, cme must be, anti one need only Le, ernancipatcd oneself, thar is to say, cor~sci«usof che true power of the human mind. The ignorant person wilI Bearn by himself whai the master doesn'r know if thr master believes he can and obliges him to realize his capacity: a circle ofpozwi homoIogous to the circle of pnwerlessness that ties the student ro rhe explicator of thc old method (to be cülled from now on, sirnply, thc 4914 Masrer). But the relation of forces is very parricular. Thc cirde of poweriessness is always already ehere: i t j s rhe very workings of the social world, hidden in the vident diKerence berwern ignorante and science. 'rhe circte o€ ower, on the other hand, can only take effect hy being made hlic. But i t can only appear as a rautoiogy or an absurdity. nnr can ehe tcarned rnaster ever understand thar he can teach e d ~ e s n 'know t as succecsf~cullyas what he does know? He but take rhat inctease in intellccr~talpower as a deval-

3

:{

j:

:j

;t

I

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true liberty was conditioned on it. After a11, they recagnized rhat they shouid give instmceion t o rhe peogle, even at thc risk of dispucing among themselves wkich instruction they would give. Jacotot did not sec what kind of liberty fot the peopie could result fxom the ducifulness of rheir instructors. O n the contrary, he sensed in all this a new form of stultificarion. Whoever teaches witkottt emancipaairlg stultihes. And whoever ernancipates doesn't have to worry about whar the ernancipated person Learns. He wili learn hc wants, nothing rnaybe. He will know he can learn because ehe Same intelligcnce is at work in all the productions of t h e human mind, and a inan can always understand another man's words, jacntot's printer had a rerarded son. They had despaired of makiiig sumerhing of hirn. jacotor taught hirn Hebrew. Later ehe child became an excetllent iithographer. I t goes without saying that he never used the Hcbrew for anyrhing-except eo know what more gifted and iearned minds never knew: it t w n ' r Hebmw. The matter was thus clear. This was not a method for instructing the people; it was a benefit to be announced to ehe poor: rhey could do everything any man could. Ir sufficed only to anrrottnce i t . Jacotot decided to devote hirnself CO this. He proclaimed that one coufd teach what one didn't know, an$ that a poor and ignorant father could, if he was ernancipated, conduct the education of his children, without the aid af aany mastcr explicatoc. And he indicated rhe way of that "universal teaching"-to leuvn something gnd to relute teo it nll rhe rest by thir principle: all men I?tave qzcctl intelligente. People wcre affected in Louvain, in Brussets, and in La Haye; they took the rnail carriage from Paris an4 Lyon;they came from England and Prussiü eo hear rhe news; it was procfaimed in Saint Petersburg and New Orleans. The word reachrd as far as Rio de Janeiro. For several years polemic raged, and the Repubtic of knowledgc was shaken at its very foundations. AI1 this because a learned man, a renowned man of sciencc an$ a virtuous fainily man, had gone crazy fur not knowing Fkmish.

The Ignorant One's Lesson

kec's go ashore, then, wirh Telernächus onto Calypso's island Let's rnizkc our way with one of the visitors into the madmari's lair: into Miss Marcellis's instt~utionin Louvatn; into the home of Ma. Dcschuyfrrieere, a tanner transfnrrned hy Jacoeot inco a Latinist; into the Ecoie Normale Militaite i r i LULIvain, where ehe philosopher-prince Fredcrick of Orange had put the Founder uf universal teachlng in charge of educating hture mzlitary instructors: "lrnagine recruits sicting on benches, murmuring in un~son:'Calypso,' 'Calypso could,' 'Calypso could not,' crc., etc.; two mor~ths later they knvw how to read, writc, and count. . . . During this primary education, rhe one was taught Engiish, the otlier Ger~nari+ rhis one fortification, that nne chemisrry, etc., etc." "Did the Fsundcr knau. all these rhings?'" "Not ar.aitl, but we explained then-t to hirn, anti I can assure you he profited greatly from che Ecole Normabe," "But I'm confused. DiJ you all, then, know chemistry?" "No, but we learned i t , and we gave hirn lcssons i n i t . That's universal teaching. It's the disciple that makes the mastet."' There is an o d e r in inadness, as in everything. Let's begin, then, at the beginning: Tiiimaque. "Everyrhing is in everything," says the madrnan. And his critics add: "And everything is in Te'/Fmque." Recause Tiie'maqrce was apparently the bonk

that could do anything. Docs the student Want to learn how tu read? Does he Want to learn English or Gerrnan, the art of ljrigatron a r of cornbät? The madman, impereurbably, w11l puc a copy of TPltmnqrde in his hands and the student will begiri to repeat, "Calypso," "Calypso could," "Calypso couid not," and so on, untit he knows the prescribed number of votumes of Tilemtrgtce and can recount them. He must ht able to ralk about everything he learns-the form of che letters, the placement or endings of words, ehe images, the reasoning, ehe characters' feelings, the rnoral lessons-ro say wb@tbe jees, qhut hp rhinkr ~ h o t r tit, what he itnnkes nf zt There was onIy one icile: he must be able to show, in the book, the materiaiity of everything he says. He will be asked ro write compnsitlons and perform improvisations under the same conditions: he rnust use the words and turns of phrase in the boak to coaistrucr his sentences; he must show, in the book, the hcts on which 111s reasoning is based. In short, ehe tilaster must be able to verify in the book the macertaliry of everyrhing the srudent says.

The lsland of che Book 1 % bbaok. ~ Te/emaqfd@ or another one. Chance piaced T&l&mq8ke at Jacutot's disposal; convenience rold him to keep it . TeIkmaque has been transiatcd into many languages and 1s easily available in hook9rores. It isn't thc greatesc masterpiece of che French language; but the style is pure, che vocabulary vasned, and the rnoraf severe. In it one learns mythoiogy and geography. Ancf behind rhe Frcnch "translaii~n,"one can hear the echo of Vergil's karin and Horner's Greek. In short, ic's a classic, one of those books zn wliich a Language gresents the essential oF its forms an$ its powers. A book that is a totalzty: a Center to urhich ane can attach everyrhing new one iearns; a c~rclein which one can zinderslnnrd each of thesr new things, find rhe ways ro say what one Sees in i t , what onc thrnks about it, what one makes of ir. This is rhe first principIe of universal caching: one must Iearn somcthing and relace everything else to i t . Aild firx jome-

ust be learned. Would La Palice say as rnucf-i?"La Palicc

, but the ilid Master would say: such and suclt a rhing

,

be learned, and chen rhis other thing and after chat, this other. Selection, progression, incomplerion: these ase hia principtes. We learn tules and eternents, then apply them to some chosen reading passages, and then do some exercises based on rhe acquired rudiments. 'Flien we graduate to a highcr level: nther rudiments, another book, other exercises, another professor. At each stage the abyss of igriorance is dug again; rhe professor fills it in before digging another. Fragments add up, dctached pieres of an explicator's knowledge thai pur the student an a trait, following a master with whorn he will never catch up. The book is never whole, tlie lesson is never finished. The mastcr always keeps a piece of learning-tiiat is to say, a piece of the stude~it'signorante-up his sleeve. I understood that, says che satisihed student, You think so, corrects the master. In fact, rhere's a diFficulty here thac li've been sparing you unril now. We will exptain it when we gct ro the corresponding lesson. What dms this mean? asks the curious student. I cuuld cell you, responds tlae master, but it woufd bc prematurc: yoii wouldn'r unrierstand at all. It will be cxplained to you next year. The masrer is afways a iength ahead of the studrrtr, who always feels that in order to g o farther he must have another inaster, suppiementary explicatioms. Thais does the triumphant Achilles d r a ~ Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of 'IToy. Reasoned progression uf knowiedge is an indefinitely rcproduced mutiiation. rnanwhu is taught is only half a man."' Don't ask if the little educated child suffers from this mucitation. The system's geriius is to transform ioss into profit, The child ~dvdnces.He kas been taught, therefote he has learned, therefore he can fnrget. Behind him ttme abyss of ignorante is beina dug again. But here's the amazing parr: from now on the

"AG

*Jailirary ieadcr, but whar made him immorral was a naive $uns clrrnlmscd by ltis rold~ers,which rnded ~ 9 1 t the h line: "Fiftcen rnineices before lris ~LarhiNewas rtrli #live.'' In French. "clir words of La Paiice" rcferr ro ang setf-evidc&irfvrmuiat1on.--TRANS

ignorante is sorneane else's, What he has forgotcen, he has sur-

passed. He no longer has to spell out loud or stumhle his way through a lesson like chose vutgar iritelligences and the children in beginiling classes* People aren't parrots in his school. We don't load rhe memory, we form the intelligente. I understood, says rhe child, I am not a parrot, Tlie mure he forgets, the more evident ir is to him that he understands. The more intelligent he becomes, the more he can peer down frorn on high at those he has surpassed, those who remain in the antechamber of learning, in front of the mute baok, rhose who repeat, because they are not intelligent enough tn tmderstilnd. This is the genius of the explicarors: they attach the creature they have rendered inferior with the serongese chains in the land of stultificacionthe child's consciousness uf his own superioaity. This consciousness, moreover, daesn't kill off good feelings. The little educated child will periiaps be rnoved by the ignorance oF rhe cornmon people and will Want tu work at instrucring them. He will know it is di&cult eo deat wich inincls hardened by routine OF befuddled by unrnethodicalness. But if he ic devoted, tte will know that there is a kind of explicacion a$apted to each category in the hierarchy of intelligel-ice: he will corne ,.., down t a-.,,theiv .- Ieve/, -, . . B u t now here is anöther story. The madrnan-the Founder, his foilowers called him-comes on srage with hPs Telemaque, . . ,

L..,

'

ad it, he says to the poor person.

I don't knaw how to read, answers the poor person. F-Eow wouid f understand what is written in the book? As you have underscood all things up until now: by compar-

:

ing two facts. Hcre is a fact rhar 8 will tell you, ehe first sentence of ehe book: "Calypso could not De consolcd after the'deparcure of Ulysses." Repeat: "Calypso," "Calypso~could" . . . Now, here is a second Fact: the words are written zhere. Don't you recognize anything? The first word I said to you was Calypso; wouldn't rhae also be the first word on the page? Look ac it closely, until youare Sure of aiways recognizing it in the middle

of a crowd of other words. In order to rfo this you must tell nic everything you see there. Therc are signs that a hand triiced on paper, signs wkose rype was assembled by a hand at the printer's. Teli rne "the story of the adventures, that is, the comings and goings, the detours-in a word, the trajectory of thc pen that wrote rhis word on paper or of the engraving tool thar eograved it onto the copper."' Would you know how ro recognize rhe letrer 4;) that one of my srudents-a Iocksmith by profession-calis "the round," the lerrer E chat he calls "rhe square"? Te11 me the form of each letrer as you would dcscribe the form of a n objecr or of an unknown place. Don't say ehat you can't. You know how to See, how to speak, you know how to show, you can remernber. What rnore is needed? An absolute attention for seeing and seeing again, saying and repeating. Don't try to fool me or fool yourseif. Is that reafly what you saw? Whdt dn jou r t ~ i l l kitbnrtt it? Aren't you a thinking bcing? Or do yoil rhink you are all body ? "The founder Sganarelle changed all rhat. . . . You have a soul like mie."* There will be time afterward CO talk about what the book talks abour: what do you think of Calypso, of sadness, of a goddess, of an eternal springXhhow tile what makes you say what you say. The book prevenrs escape. The route the student will take is unknown. But we know what he canncx escape; the exercise uf his libert~.We know too that ttie rnaster won't have the right tu stand anywhere else-anly at the door. The student must see everything for hirnseif, compare and compare, and always respond to a three-part question: what do you see? whar do you thinkabout it? what do you rnake of it? And so ori, to infinity. Bur that irifinity is no longcr the master's secret; ic is the student's jaurney. The book is finished, It is a totality that the srudent holds in his hand , that he can span entirety with a glance. There is nothing the nlasrer can hide from Iiim, and nothing he can hide from ehe master's gaze. The circie forbids cheating, and above all, that great cheat: incapacity. I tan'b, I don't t/ndersrund. There is nothing CO understand. Everything is i n the book. One has only to recounr ie-the form of each sign, the advenrures

-24

The Ignurcant One's tessun

of each sentence, the lesson d e a c h volume. One must begin to speak. Don't say ehat you can't, You know how to say "I can't." Say in its place "Calypso could not," and you're off. You'rc off on a route that you atready kncw, and that you should follow always vithout giving up. Don't say: "I can'c." Or then, learn to say it in the manner of Calypso, in the manner of Telemachus, of Pdarhal, of Idornenreus. The other circle has begun, the circle of power. You will never run out of ways to say "I can't," and soon you witf able eo say everything. A voyage in a circle. Ir's understood that the adventiires o i Uiysses's son form rhe manual, and Calypso the first word. Ca: lypso, the htdden one. But precisely what miiat be discovered is thae there is nothing hidden, no words undernearh words, no language that tells rke truth of language. Signs and Stil1 more signs are learned, sentences and still more sentences. Readymade seritences are repeated. Entire books are learned by heart. And the Old Master becornes indignant: so this is what learning something means for you. First, your children repeat like parrors. They cultivate vnIy one faculty, rnemory, while we exercise itlreliigence, taste, and irnagination. Your children .learn by I-eart. That's your first misrake. And rhis is .youc sccond: yout children a!o?zlt leitrtz by heart. You say that they do, but that's impossible. Human brains in generat, and those of children in particular, are incapabfe of such an effott of memory. A circular argument. The discoucsc of one circle t o another. The proposirions must be overrutned. The Old Master says thar a clnild's memory is incapable af such eRoorcs because powerlessness, in general, is its Slogan. It says that memory is something other than inrelkigence or imagination and, in so doing, i t uses an ordinary weapari against those that Want t o prevail over powerlessness: divigion. It beiieves memory CO be weak because it doesn't beiieve in the power nf human intelligence. It believes it inferior because it believes irr inferiors and superiors. in the end its double argument amounts to this: there are inferiors and superiors; inkriors can'r do what superiors can. The 01d Master knows only this. Et depends on inequaiity,

but not the inequality that acknowfedges tlie Pritlcc's decrec, the inequaiity that goes without saying, that is in all hcads and in alt sentences. For that, it has its genrle weapon, difference: this is not t h t , thir isfarfrom tbut, olle cannot compar~. . . Memory is not intelligence; to repeat is not tn know; comparison isn't reason; there is the ground and the background, Any fiour can be ground up in ehe mill of distinction, A t ~ dthe argument can thus be mdernized and extended to ehe scientific as weil as to the humanitarian: tilere are stages in the developmenc of intelligence; a chitd's intelfigence is not an adult's; a child's intelligence should not Le overburdened--one runs the risk of injuring his health, his hculties. The 01ri Master demands only thar hc be granted his negacions and his differentes: this is not that, this is something dieerent, this is mare, this is less. And this is enough to exalt all the thrones of the hierarchy of intelligence. Calypso and rhe kocksmith Let ttte CPid Master h~ve11is say. Let's look at the facts. There is a will rhat commands and an intelligence that obeys. Let's call the act that makes an intelligence proceed under the absolute constraint of a will artention. It makcs no difference whethcr the act is directed ac che form of a letrer to be recognized, a sentence to be mernorized, a relation to be found between two mathematicai entities, or the ctements of a speech to Le composed. There is not one faculty that records, another that understands, another that judges. The locksmith whocalls the letter 0 "the round,"and L "the square" is already thinking about relations. And inventing is not oP another order than ietnern.bering. Let the expiicators "form" che children's "tasre" and ,, imaginarion"; ler them expound on the "genius" of creators.

We will be content to do as creators do: like Racine, who memorized, teanslated, repeated, and irnitated Euripides; Bossuet, who did the same with Tercullian; Rousseau with Amyot ; Boik a u with Horace and Juvenal; like Demosrhenes, who copicd

26

Tbr ignorant One's Lesson

--

Thucydides eight times; I-,lioofr, wtio read Tacirus fifty-two times; Seneca, who recommended [hat the same book be read and teread; Waydn, who recreated six of Bach's sonatas over and over; Michelangelo, who spent his time redoing rhe Same torso again and again. Power cannor be dividcd up. There is only one power, that of saying and speaking , OE paying attetltion CO what one sees and says. One Iearns sentences and more sentences; one discovers h c t s , that is, relations berweet~chings, and still orher relarions that are all of the Same nature; one learns to combine letters, words, sentences, ideas. It witt not be said that one has acquired science, that one knows truch or has became a geriius. But it will be known rhat, ,in the intellectual order, one can d o what any man can do. F h i s is what evtrything is in everytbing means: rlie tautology of power. All the power of language is in the totality of a book. All knowledge of oneself as an intelligence is in the mastery of a bciok, a chapter, a scntence, a word. Everything is in evcrything and everything is in Ti/inz(~qtce,scoff the crirics, and, to carch the disciples off guard, they ask, 1s everyrhnng also in rhe Frrst volurne of Td~kwyae? And in its Birst word? JS mathematicc in TeIe'maque?And in the first ward of Te'lmuqae? And the disciple k e l s the grniind slip out From under him and calls on rhe master for help: what should he answer? You should have answered that ynu believe ali human works to be in the word Calypso since this ward is a work of human intelligence. He who calculared fractions is the same intellect~ialbeing as he who made the worci Calypso. The artist knew Greek; he chose a word that rneant "crafty," "hidden." The artisr resembles che one who imagined the ways o l writing the word we're talking about.He resembles rhe one who made ehe paper on which we write, the one who uses pens to the same purpose, the one who sharpens the pens witk ii penknife, ehe one who madc the penkriife out of iron, the one who procured the iron, rhe one who made the ink, the oiie whn prinred rhe ward Lalypso, the one who rnade che printing machine, the one who generalized the explications, rhe one who made the princing ink, etc., etc., etc. All sciences, all art, anatomy, dynarnics, and so On, are the fruits of the saine intelligence who made ttle word Calypso. A philosopher

arriving in an unknown land would know it was inhabiced when he saw a geometrical Ftgure in the sand. "These are human foocprints," he says. I-fis cornpanions believe him mad because thc lines he shoals rhem don'r Iook likt: a Footprint. 'I'he schotars of the perfecced nineteenth century open their startled eyes wide when someone points a Finger ar the word Calypso and tells them, " Ahuman hand is there." I bet rhat the man sent frorn rhe Ecole Nor~nalein France, looking at the word Calypso, would say: "That doesn't I-tave the shape of a hand." "Evevything: is in eo~wything."" Here is everything that is it? Calypso: the power of inteiligence thar is in any human manifestation. The Same intelligence makes nouns and mathematicnl signs. What's more, it also makes stgns atld reasonings. These aren't two sorts of rninds. TRere is inequality in ttie nmnijfe~r~rinni of intelligence, according ro the greater or lesser encrgy communicated to rhe inrelligence hy the will for discovering and comhining new reiations; but there is no hierarchy of ipttel'lectrlaal rapncity. Emancipation IS becorning consciolis of tiiis equality of nature, This is what Opens the way to all adventure in the land of knowledge. Ir is a matter of daring to be advenruruus, and not whecl-ter one learns more or Jess well or morc or less quickly. The "Jacotot method" is nar betrer: it is different. That's why the procedures used matter very Iittle in themselves. Xt could be T'di&mnqtle,or it could be something else. O n e begins with t h r text and not with gramrnar, wich entire words and not wich syltables, Ir is not that it is absolutely necessary to learn this way co Icarri better, and that the jacotot method is rhe forefarher of the g l o b l method. In face, it's much faster to start with "Calypsn" and not with rhe A,B,Cs. Bur the speed won 1s only an effecc of power gained, a consequence of the emancipatory principle. "The Old Master begins with letters because he directs srudentc raccording t o the principte of intellectual inequatity, and especially rhe intellectual inferioriry oF children. He believes that letters are easier t o dicringuish than words; this is wcong, but this is what he thinks. He believes t l ~ a at child's intelligence is only able t o learn C, A , C , and thar an adult, that is to say a superior, intelligence is necessary to learn Catypso."' In short,

B, A,B, like Calypso, is a flag; in~abilitpversus abiliiy. Spelling is an ace of contrition before being a way OE learning. That's why one could change the order of the procedures without changing anything in the principles. The Old Master rnight one day rake ir into his head to train CO read by words and only then, maybe, would we have our studenrs learn how to spei1 chem. And what wouId result from this apparent change of posrure? Nothing, Our students urouid bc no less emancipated and the chlldren of the 01d Master no iess stultified. . . . The Old Master doesn't stuitify hhis students by rnaking chern spell; he stultifres by telling rhcrn rhat they can'c spell by cbernselves. Making them read by words won't emancipate thern; it will deaden them because he will be very careful to tell rhem that their young intefiigence ,can'r do without the explications he pulls otrt of his aged brain. ift is thus not the procedure, thc cnurse, the rnanner, rhat emancipates or stultifics; it's the principle, The principle of inequality, thc old prrnciple, stultifies no matter what one does; the pririciple of equality, theJacutot principle, e~nancipatesno matter whac pracedure, book, or fair it is applied to.'

- --

The problern is to reveveal an intelligence ro itself, Anyihing can be used. Tef6m~lque.O r a prayer or a Song that tbe child or the ignorant one knows by heatt. There i s always something tfie ignorant one knows that can be used as a point of comparison, something eo which a new thing to be learned can be related. The locksmith who opens his eyes wide when told he can read bears witness t o this. He doesn't even know the alphabet. Let hirn take the time to glance at the calendar, Doesn't he know the o d e r of the months and can't he thus figure out January, February, March. He knows how to Count a little. An4 what's to prevent hjm from counting sofrly while following the lines iri order to recognize in written form what he already knows? He knows he is calted William and thac his birthday isJanuary I 6th. He will soon know how to find the word. H e knows that February has only twenty-eight days. H e sees char one colurnn is shorter than the others and he will recognize "28." And so on. There is always ssrnething that the master can ask him to

find, something abouc which he can quesaion him and thus verify the work of his inteiligence.

The Master and Socrates These are in facr the master's two fundamental acrs. H e inhe cfemands speech, that is to say, the manifestation of an inteiligence rhat wasn't mare of itself or ihai had given up. And he uerifef rhar the work of the inteiligence is done with attention, that the words don't say jusc anyrhing in order ta escape from the constraint. 1s a highly skilled, very learned master necessary t o perform this? On ehe contrarp, ahe learned masW'S science makes it very difficult for him not to spoif the method . He knows ehe response, and kis questions lead rhe student to it naturally. This is the secret of good masters: rhrough tbeir questions, chey discreetly guidc che student's intelligence--discreerIy enough to make i c work, but not to the point af Leavitig it ro iiself. Therc is a Socrates sleeping in every explicator. And it musr be very cfear how the Jacotot rnerhudthat is co say, the student's merhod-diEers radically frnm the method of theSocratic mastec.. Through his incerrogations, Socrates Ieads Meno's siave to rccognize the mathemarical rruths rhat lie within himself, This may be the path to Icarning, but i t is in no way a path to emancipation. O n the contrary, Socrates musr ~ a k the e slave by his hand so that the latter can find what is inside himself. The demonstration of his knowledge is just as much the demonctration oF his powerlessnesc: he will netfer walk by himseif, unlesc it is to illusrrate the master's lesson. In this case, Socrates interrogates a slave who is descined to remain one. The Socratic rnetfiod is thus a yerfecred form of stuitificatiun. Like all learned rnasters, Socraees interrogates in order ro instruct. But whoever wishes to cmancipate someone must interrogare hirn in the nanrler of men and nnt in the rnanner of scholaxs, in order co he instructcd, not to instruct. And rhac can only he performed by someone who effectiveiy knüws no rnore tewogdtes,

I

The lgnnratzt Onek Eer.rcln

1

rhan rhe student, who has never made the voyage before him: the ignorant master. There's no rrsk of thls master sparing the child the time necessary to account for the word Calypso. But what does he have ro do with Calypso and how would he even undersrand anything abour i t ? Let's forget Calypso for a mom e n t . v h o is the chi1d who hasn't heard rhe ~ord'sPrayer, who hasn't Iearned the words by lieart? In this way the thnng is found, and the yoor and ignorant father who wants CO teach his son to read will not be embarrassed He will certainly find some obliging person In the neighbothood, someone litenate enough to copy the prayer for him. With this, the faehec ot the mothcr can begin the child's instruction by asking him wbere the word Our 1s. "lf the ckild ~s attentive, he w ~ i say l that the hrsr word on the paper must be Our, since it is thc Arst wurd in the sentence. Father will necessarily be the second word; rhe child will be able to compare. distinguish, know these two words and recognize them e~erywhere,"~ Who rs the farher ar mother wha would not know how to ask the child, struggling wirh the texr o i the prayer, wtiat he Sees, what he makes of it or what he can i say about it, and what he thinks about what hc's saying or doing? Ir's the Same way he woutd ask a neighbor about the tool he holds in his hand and how i t is uscd. T0 teach what one doesn't know is simply t o ask questions abotit what one doesn't. knotv. Science icn't needed to ask such questions. The ignorant one can ask anything, and for the Voyager in the land of signs, his questions alone will be true questions cornpelling rhe au' tonomous exercise of h ~ intefligence. s Granted, reglies the cr~tic.Bur that which makes the interrogator forceful also makes him incompetcnr as a verificr. How will lie know if the chiid is lasing his way? The father or morhet can always ask the child: show me "Fathcr" or "'Hraven." But how can they verify if ehe ckild has pointed to rhe right word? The dif-cdty can only get worse as the chtid advances-if he advances-in ltis training. Won't the ignorant rnaster and thc: ignorant student be playing out the fable of the blind man leading the blind?

3T

The Power of the Ignorant Let's begin by reassuting ehe crirics: we will not make of the ignorant one thc fount of an innate sciei-ice, and especialiy not of a science of the people as opposed to that of the scholar. One must be iearned to judge the results of the work, to verify tbe srudcnr's science. The ignorant one himself will do les.r and tnove a t t f ~ eSame time. He will not verify what the student has found; he will verify that the student has searched. He wilj jitdge whether or not he has paid artention. For onc need only be Iiuman to judge the facc of work. Just iike t l ~ ephilosopher who "recognizes" human footprints in tfic Iines in the sand, die mother knows how co sce "iri Iiis epes, in the chifd's fearures, when he is doing work, when he is pointing to the words in a sentence, if he is atrentive co what he i s doing,""' Th e ignorant rnaster inust demand frorn his ctudene that he prove to hirn that he has studied attentively. Is this insignificant? ?'hink abour ewrything che detnand implies for thc student in rhe way of an endless task. Think about the intelligente it can afsu grant to the ignorant examiner: "Whar prevents the igris~ianibur man~ipcttedmother frorn noticing ail the times that she asks the child where 'Father' 15, whcrher or not he always poines ro thc Same word; what prevents her hiding thc word and asking, what is the wurd under n y finger? Etc., etc,"" A pious image, a housewife's recipe . . . This is huw che officia1 spokesman of the explicative rribe judged it: "Oizernn teilch U J ~ one R ~doesn'r knozu is still a housewife's r n o r t ~ . " We ' ~ will argue that "maternal int~iition"does not exert any domestic privilege here. The finger that hides die word Father is the same that is in Calypso, the hidden or rhe crafty: ehe mark of human inteiligence, the most rlementary ruse of i ts teasun-the trur reason, thr orie proper to each and comnion to alt, this reason that is manifested in an exempiary fashion whenever the ignorant one's knowledge and rhe rnasrer's ignorante, hy becorning equal, demonstrate the power5 of intellectual ecluality. "Man is '

an animal wha can tell very well when a speaker doesn'r know what he's talking about"; "that ability is what unites us as hum a n ~ . " The ' ~ practice of the ignorant maseer is not rhe simple expedient oF allowing clte poor who have neither time, nor rnoney, nor knowledge, co educate their children, It is the cruciai experiment that liberates the pure powers of reason wherever science does not lend a hanci. What one ignorant person can perform once, all ignorant people can always perform-because there is no hierarchy in ignorante. What ignorant people and learncd people can both do can be called the power of thC. intelligent being as such. This power oE equaliry is at once one of dualiry and one of cornrnuniey. Theee is no inreliigence where there is aggregaeion, the ßindisg of one mind to another. There is intelligente where each person acts, tells wtiat he is dolng, anrl gives the means of verifying the reality of his action. 'E'he thing in common, placed between two minds, is the gauge of that equalicy, and this in twu ways. A material rhing is first of all "the oniy bridge of communication between two minds."l4 The bridge is a Passage, but it is also distance maintained. The rnateriality o f the book keeps two minds ar an equal distance, whereas explication is the annihilarion of-one mind by anocher. Bur the thing is also an always available source of material verificatioa: che ignorant examiner's art is ro "bring che exarninee back to tke material objects, to a thing that he can veriS with his senses,"" The exarninee is always beholden to a verifiration in the open book, in the rnateriality of each word, thc c u m of each sign. The tliing, the book, psevenrs cheating by both the ignorant and the learned. This is why the igi~orantrnaster can from time to time exeend his competence ro the point.ofverifying, not che child's knowledge, but the attention he gives to what he is doing and saying. In this way you can even bc of service to one of your neighbors who finds himself, because of circumstances beyond his conrral, fotced to send his son ro school. Hf the neighbnr asks you to verify rhe young student's knowldge, you need not hesirate ro perform this inquiry,

evcn t h o u ~ hyou have had no sclioolitig. "What are you learning, iny little friend?" you wiII ack rhe cfiild. "Creek." "What?" "Aesop," "What?" "The Fabtes." "Which ories do you know?" "The first one." "Where i s the first word?" "There i t is." "Give me your book. rne the fourth word. Write i t . What ynti have written doesn't Iook like rhe fourth word in rhe book. Neighbnr, rhe child doesn't kiiow what he says he knows. This is proof that he wasn't paying attcntivn whih studying or while displaying what he says he knows. Advise him to study; I will return and tell you if he is learning the Creek ehac I n~yselfdon't know, rhar B don't even know how to read."'"

TRis is the way rhat the ignorant master can instruct the learned one as well as rhe ignorant one: by verifying thac he 1s always searching. Whoevcr looks always finds. He doesn't necessariiy find wtlat he was looklng for, and even less what hc was supposcd to find. Bur he finds somcthing new to relate to che thin8 that he already knows. What is essential i s the continuous vigllance, che attention rkat never subsides wittiout irrationality secting in-something that the learned one, like the ignorant one, excefs at. T\le rnaster is he who keeps the researcher on his own route, the one thar he alone is following and keeps following. Ta h c h His Own

Still, to vcrify this kind of research, o n e must know what seeking or researching means. And this is the heart of the method. "10 emancipate someone ehe, one must be emancipated oneself. One must know oneseif ro be a Voyager o f ahe mind, similar to all otlier voyagew: an intellecrual subject parricipating in ehe power comrnon to incellectual beings. How does one accede to this self-knowledge? 'X peasant, an artisan (fathcr of a farnily!, will be intetlectuatly emancipared if Irr rhinks ahout what he is and what kie does in the social order."" This assertion will seem simple, and even sirnplistjc, eo whoever ignores the weight of philosophy's old commanlirnent, from rhe mourh of Platr?, on the artisan's dectiny; Don't

--

The Ignorant O I ELesson ~ ~

do anything other than yovr oecm a@r, which is not in any way bhinkin~,but simply nlnkivlg that thing rhat exhausts the dehnition oC your being; if you are a shoernaker, make shoes-and make chifdren wllo will do the same. The Delphic oracie was not speaking to you when it said, K.now yourself. And even if the playful divinity had fiin mixing a Iirtie gold into your child's soul , it is the golden race, the guardians of the city, who will take on the task of raising him to be one of theirs. The age of progress utidoubtediy wanted to shake the rigidity from the old commandmcnt, Afong with ehe Encyclopedisrs, this age undetstands that nothing is done by routine anymwe, not even attisans' work. And it knows thac chere is no social actor, no matter how insignificant, who is not at the Same time a thinking being. Citizen Destutr-Tracncy recalled rhis ar the dawning of the new century: "Every speaking man has ideas uf ideolog~,grammar, logic, and etoquence. Every man whn acts has principles of private morafs and social moralc. Every being who merely vegetaces has his notions of physics and arithmetic; and simply because he lives with those Bike himself, he has his little cullection of hisroeica1 facts and his vay of evali~aring them."'" I t 1s L ~ L I impossible S for shoemakers just to rnake shoes, tltat they not also be, in their rnanner, gramrnarians, rnoralists, or physicists. And this is rhe fjrst problern: as long as peasants and artisans form rnoml, mathematical, or physical nlptions based on their environniental routine ur their chance encounters, che reasoned march of progress will be doubly at risk: slowed down by men of routine and superstition, or disrt~ptedby the haste of violent tnen. Therefore, a minimum of instruction, drawn frum the principles of reason, science, and the general incerest, is necessary co put sane norions into heads [hat would otherwise form fauity ones.*Andit gocs without saying that the entetprise wifl be all the more profitable if it rernoves the son of a peasant OP artisan from the natural miiieii that praduces tliose false i d m , But this evidcncc imrnediately runs u p againsr a Contradiction; the child who muse be removed from his rautine arid

35

from superstitiuri musc nevertheless bc returned to his activity and his condition. And since its dawning, the age of progress has been alert to rhe mortal danger of separating the child of the pcople from the condition to which he is destined aild from the ideas that hold fast in that condition. Thus the age tutns back an4 forth wirhin this contradicrion: rhac alI che sciences are now known to be founded on simple principles availabfe co all ehe minds who Want to make use of thcm, provided they folfaw rhe rigt~tmerhnd. Bur rhe Same nature that opens up a careet in science to alf rninds wants a social order where thc classes are separated and where individuals conform to thc social state rhat is their dcstiny. Thc solution to thiscontradiction is found in the ordered balance of instructiori and rnoral education, the dividing up of rhc roies that fall to ehe schoolmaster aiid to ehe father of the family.. Using the light of instruction, the First chases away the false ideas thc cliild receives fron his parental rnilieu; thc cecond, by moral education, chases away the extravagant aspirations the scho«lchild would like to exrract fiom his young science and take back to his life condition. The father, incapable of drawing on his own experience to furcher his child's intejfectual instrucrinn, is, an the other hand, all-puwetful in teaching him, by word and exarnple, the vircuc of remaining in liis condition. The famify is at once the nucleus af inrellectual incapacity and the principle of ethical objectivity, This double character translates into a double limitation on the artisaäi's self-corisciousness: the consciousness of whar he does is dmwn from a science chat is not his own; the consciousriess of what he js leads him back to doing nothing orher than his own task. Let us say ir more simply: rhe harmonious balance of instruction and moral edttcation is that of a double stultification. Emancipation is precisely thc opposire of this; it is each man becoming conscious of his nature as an ineellectuaf subject; it 1s ttle Cartesian forrnula of equality read backwards. "Descartes said, '1 think, eherefore I am'; and ttiis nobie thought of the grear phiiosopher is une of che principles of universal tcaching.

36

The Ignorant One'r Lessotz

We turn his thought around and say: 'I am a man, therefore 1 think.' "I9 TThe reversal equates "man" wirh cogtto. Thought is not an attribute of the thinking substance; it is an attribute of hzmzanzty. %O transform "Kn0.w yourself" inro the principle of ernancipation of any human being, it is necessary to activate, against the Platonic interdicrion, one of the fantasric etymologies of the CrarjIa~:man, the anthropos, is the being who examines whut /3e sees, who knows himself in so eeflecttng on his act. 20 Tiie whole praceice of universal teaching is summed up in tbe question: what do you think about it? iits whole power lies in thc consciousness of emancipation that it realiaes in the master and gives birth to in the stiident. The father'kould emancipate his son if he begins by knowing himcelf, that ip'to say, by examining the intellectual acts of which he is the subject, by noticing the manner in which he uses, in these acts, his power as a thinking being. The consciousness of emancipation is above a!! the inventory of the ignotant one's intellectual capabilities. He knows his language. H e also knows how to use it to Protest against his state or to interrogate those who know, or who believe they know, more ehan he knows. He knows his trade, his toois, and their uses; he would be able to pesfect them if need be. H e must begin to reflect on bis abilities and on the manner in whicb he acquired them. Let's cake ehe exact measure of chat reflection, It is not about opgosing manual knowledge, ehe knowledge of the people, the inceiligence of the tool and of the worker, co ehe science of schools or the rhetoric of ehe elite, It is not about asking who built seven-gaced Thebes as a way to vindicate the place of constructors and makers in the social order. O n ehe contrary. it is about recognizing thar there are not two levels of ineelligence, [hat any human work of art is the pracrice of the same intellectual potential. In all cases, i c is a question of observing, comparing, and combining, of making and notieing how one has done ic. Whac is possible is reflection: that return ta oneself [hat

is not pure contennplacion but rathet an unconditiorial attention to one's intellectual acts, tu the route they fol1o.r~and to the possibility of always moving forward by bringing to bear tht Same intelligence on the conquest of new territories, H e who makes a distinction between the manual work of the worker or the common man and clouds of rhetoric temains stultified. The fabrication of clouds is a human work of arr that demands as rnuch-neither more nor less-Iabor and intellectual attention as the fabrication of shoes or locks. The acadernician Lerrninier expounded on the intellecrual incapacity of the people. Lerminier was a stuitified person. But a srultiiied person is neither lazy nor a foo3.. And we oursefves would be stuItified if wedidn't recognize in his theses the same art, the Same intelligence, the same Iahor as those acts thar transforrn wood, stone, or leather. It is only by recogniting Eerminier's Iizbnr that we can recognize the inteldige~cemanifesred in the most humble of works. The poor vitlage people who live outside of Grenobie work ac making gioves; they are paid thirty cents a dozen. Since they became emancipated, rhey work hard at looking at, studying, and undersranding a weil-made glnw. They will understand the meaning of all the sentenceJ, all the tuoudj of the glove. They will end up speaking as wcll as the city womeri who earn seven francs a dozen. 8rie has otily CO lcarn a language spoken wirh scissors, needle, and thread. It is merely a quvstion (in human societies) of understanding and speaking a lang~age.~' ,

The material ideality of language refutes any opposition between the golden race and the iron race, any hienarchy---even an invertcd one-between rnen devoted to manual work and men destined to the exercise of thought. Any work of language is understood and executed the Same way, Ir is for this reason that the ignotant one can, as soon as he knows himself, verify his son's research in the book he doesn't know how to read: he doesn't know the maeerials he is working with, but if his son teils I-iim how he goes co work at it, he will recognize if his son i s doing reseatch, because he knows what seeking, researching,

is. H e has only one thing to ask his son: to move words and sentences back and forth, as he hirnself moves his tools back an$ forth when he is seeking. The book-TkI6m11qtie or any other-placed becween ewo minds Sums up the ideal cornmunity inscribed in the materiaiity of things. The Look ir the equality of intelligence. This is why the same philosophical commandment prescribed that the artisan do nothing bur his own affait and condernned the democracy of the book. The PIatonic phitosopher-king favored the living ward to the dead letter of the book-that thoughtbecome-material at the disposition of men of substance, chat discourse at once siient an$ too laquacious, wandering at random among thosc whose only business is thinking. The explicative privilege is onfy the small change of that interdiction. And the privilege that the Jacotoe method gave to the book, to the manipiitiation of signs, to mnenotechnics, was the exact. rcvercai of the hietarchy of minds that was designated in Plato by . ~ ~book seals the new relation bethe critique of ~ r i t i n g The tween rwo ignoranr yeople who recognize eacl-i other from thae: point on as inrelligent beings. And this new relation undoes the stultiQing relation of intellectual inscruction an$ rnoral education. lntervening in lieu of the disciplinary demands of education is the decision ro ernancipate that renders the father or rnother capabie of taking the ignorant schuolmaster's placethae piace where the unconditional exigency of the will is incarnated. Unconditional exigency: the ernancipatoxy father is not a simple good-narured pedagogue; he is an inrractable master. The emancipatory commandment knows no compromises. It absolutely cornrnands of a subject what: it supposes it is capable of comrnanding of itseff. The son will verify in the book the equality of intelligence in the same way that the fariist or rnother will verify the radical nature of his research. Lhe famity unit is then no longer the place of a return that brings the arttsan back to ehe cnnsciousness of his incapaciey. It is one of a new consciousness, of an overtaking of the seiF that extends each

person's 'own ilRdir" to the pnint wliere i t ir Part and parcel af the common reason enjoyed by all. T h e Blitid Man and His Dog For it is indeed this tliat is verified: rhe principie of the equality of all speaking beings. By cornpellirig his son's will, the father in a poor family verifies that his son has the same inrelligence as he, that he seeks in the Same way; and what tfle son, in turn, looks h r in tlie bouk is the intelligence of tlie book's author, in ordcr to verify that it ptoceeds in the Same way as his own. Thar teciprocity i s rhe hearc of the emancipatoty method, rhe principle of a n e a philosophy tliat the Founder. by joining together two Greek words, baptized "panecastic,"" because it lovks for the total+ of human intelligence in euch iritelfeccuai rnanifestation. No doubt the Iandowner who sent his gardener to be trained at Louvain for the Lenefit of bis own sons' instrucrion didn't understand this wry weII There are no particular pedagogical petiormances to expect from an emincipared gardener or from the ignorant master in general Essentially, what an ernancipated Person can do is be an emancipator: to give, not the key to knowiedge, but the consciousriess of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to icself, Ernancipation is the consciousness of that equality, of that reciprociry rhar alone perrnits intelligence to be realired by verification. What stultifies the common people is not the lack of instruction, but the belief in rhe inferioriry of their intelligence. And what rtultifies rhe "inferiors" stultifies rhe "superiors" at the same time. For rhe oniy verihed intelligence is the one that speaks to a Fellow-man capable of vetifying rhe equalitp oF their tnrellipence. The supetior mind condemris irself to never beirig understood by inferiors. He can only assute himself of his intelligence by disqualifying those who could show h i n 'From rhe G r e e k ~ n rvexyrhing, , and brhastor, cach: cverythinp: in C O ~ ~ , - T R & N S .

40

The Ignorant One's Lefson

their recognition of it. Consider the scholar who knuws that feminine minds are inferior to mascutine minds; he spends the essential part of his life conversing with someone who cannot understand him: "What inrimary! What sweetness in the conversations of love! In the coupfe! Xn the famity! He who is speaking is never Sure of being understood. H e has a mind and a heart, a great rnind, a sensitive heart! But the corpse to which the social chain has attached him, ala~!''~'Will the acimiration of his students and of the exterior world console him for this domestic disgrace? Whae worrh is an inferior rnind's judgment of a superior mind? "Teil a paet: I was very happy,yqh your s you give nie latest book. He will respond, ptncking h ~ lips: ~nnchhonor; that is to say, niy dear Fellow, I. cannot be fattered by the commendation of so srnali an intelligence as y o ~ r s . " ~ " But ehe belief in intellectual inequality and in the superiority of one's own intelligence does not belong to scholars and diseinguished poets alone. Xts force comes frorn the fact that i c embraces the entire popularion undet the guise of humility. I can't, rhe ignoranr one you are encouraging to teach himself declares; i am oniy a worker. J.isten carefully co everything there is in that syllogisrn. First of all, "I can't" rneans "X don't Want to; why would I make the efforr?" Which also rneans: 1 undoubtedly couiid, for I am intelligent. But X arn a worker: people like me can't; rny neighbor can't. And what use would it be for me, since I have to deal with imbeciles? So goes ehe belief in inequality. There is no superior mind that doesn'e Find an even more superior one to bc lower to; no inferior rnind rhat doesn't find a rnore inferior one to hold in concempt. The professorial gown of Louvain Counts Iitcle in Paris. And tlie Parisian artisan Rno~i~s how inferior provincial artisans are to hirn; these, in turn, know how backward peasants are. The day when those peasants think thae they know things themselves, and rhat the Parisian professorial gown drapes a lamebrain, the loop wiil bc closed. The universal superiotity of inferiors will unite with the universal inferiority of superiors to create a world where no inteiligence could recognize another as

its equal. For reason is iost whcre one Person speaks to another who is unable to reply to hirn. "There is no more beautifuiil spectacle, none more instructive, than rhe spectacle of a man speaking. Bua: the listener must reserve the righc to think about what he has just heard, and the speaker musc engage with him in this. . . , The fistener must thus verify if the speaker is actualiy within the bounds of reason, if he departs from it, if he returns to ic. Without that authorized verification, necessitated by the very eyuality of intelligente, I sec nothing in a conversation but a discourse between a blind man and his dog."" The apology of ehe blind man speaking to his dog is the world of unequal intclligence's response to rhe fable of the blind leading the blind. We can see ihat it is a question of philosophy anrJ hurnanity, not of reciyes for chitdren's pedagogy. Universal teaching is above afl the universal verification of the similatity of what all the emancipated can do, afl those who have decided to think of thernselves as people jusc Iike everyone else. Everything Bs in Everything Everything is in everything. The power of the rautology is that of equality, the power that searches for the finger of inteItigence in every human work. This is the meaning of rhe exercise that astounded Baptiste Proussard, a progressive man and director of aschooI in Grenoble, who accompanied the two sons of the dcputy Casimir E t i e r co Louvain. A member of the Society of fiaching Merhods, Baptiste Froussard had already heard of universal teaching, and in Miss Narcellis's class, he resognized tke exercises that che society's president, Jean de Lasteyrie, had dcscribed. He there saw young giris write compositions in fiteen minutes, some on the topic of "'ffhe Last Mari," others on "The Exite's Return," creating, as the Founder assured him, pieces of titerature "that did not spoil the B&tdty of thc most beautiful pages of our besr authors." I t was an assertion that learned visitors had greeted with the deepest reservatians. Bur Jacotot had found a way to convince them: since they evidentiy

42

The ignorant One? La.ron 6

T h fgnnvcdnr One? Lesson

4.3

.-

considered themselves to be among the best writers of their time, they had only to subrnit themselves to the same resc and give the students the possibiiity of comparing. De tasteyrie; who had lived through 1 7 9 3 , had lent himself willingly to the exercise. This had not been the case with Guigniaut, an envoy frorn the Ecole Normale in Paris who, though he was unable tu See any significance in Calypso, had managed to see the unforgivable lack of a circumfiex on cior^tvein one of the compositions. Invited to the test, he arrived an h«ur late and was told to come back the next day. But that afternoon he caught the maii carriage for Paris, carrying in his baggage as darnning cvidence thc shameful i deprived of a circurnflex. After reading the compositions, Baptiste Froussard sat in on classes of improvisation, This was an essential exercise in universal teaching: to learn to speak on any subject, off the cuff, with a beginning, a deveioprnent, and an ending. Learnirig to improvise was first of all fearning ta wercoma on~seIf,to ovetcome rhe pride that disguises itself as humility as an excuse for one's incapacity to speak in front of others-that is to say, one's refusal to submit oneseif to their judgment. And after that it was tearning CO begin and to end, to rnake a totulity, to close up language in a circle. Thus two students improvised with assurance on the topic of "The Atheist's Death," after which, to dissipate such sad thoughts, Jacotot asked another student to improvise on "The Plight of a Fly." Hiiarity erupted in the classroom, but Jacorot was ciear: tliis was not about laughing, it was about speuking. And the young student spoke for eight and a half minutes on rhis airy subject, saying charming things and rnaking graceful, freshly imaginative connections. Baptiste Froussard had also participated in a music lesson. Jacotot had asked him for fragrnents of Freflch poetry, on which the students improvised rnelodies wir11 ac~om~anirnents that they interpreted in a deiightful manner. Baptiste Froussard came back tu Miss Marceilis's sever~timore times, assigning cornpositions himself on morals and metaphysics; all were perforrned with aii admirable facility and talent. But the following

'i_,'

exercise surptised hirn the rnosr. One day, Jacotot addtessed the students: "Young iadies, you know that in every human work there js att; in a steam engine as in e dress; in a work of literatlire as in a shoe. Well, you will now write me a cornposition an art in general, connecting your words, your expressions, your thoughts, to such and such passages from the assigned authors in a way rhat lets you justify or verify everything."'" Various books were brought to Baptiste Froussard, and he himself indicated ro one student a passage from Atklie, CO another a grarnmar chapter, to others a passage frorn Bossuet, chapters on geography, on division in Lacroix's arithmetic, and so ori. He did not have to wait iong for the rcsults of this Strange cxercise on such bateiy comparable things. After a half hour, a new astonishment came over him when he heard the quality of the cnrnposicions just writren beneath his nose, and the improvised comrnentaries that justified thern. He particularfy adrnired an explication of art done on rhe Passage from Athiilze, along with a justification ot verificacion, which was comparabie, in his opinion, to rhe most brilliant lirerary lesson he had evcr heard. That day, more than ever, Baptiste Froussard understood in what sense one can say that eterytbi?zg is in evetything. He already knew that Jacotot was an astunishing pedagogue and he could guess ar the quality of rhe scudents forrned under his direction. But he returned home having understood one more thing: Miss Marceliis's students in Louvain had the same intelligente as the giovemakers in Grenoble, arid even--this was more difficult to admit-as the giovemakers on the outskirts of Grenoble.

We inusr look further into che reason for these effects: "We direcr students based on an apinion about ttle equaliey of intelligence." Whac is an opinion? An opinion, the explicators respond, is a fetling we form about facts we have superficially observecl. Bpinions grow especially in weak and common minds, and they are the opposice of science, which knows the true reasons for phenomena. If you like, we will teach you science. Slow down. We grant you [hat an opinion is not a truth. Bur this is precisely whac interests us: whoever does not know the trutti is looking for i t , and there aee many encounters to make atong the way. The only mistake would be to take our opinionc for the truth. Admittcdly, this Aäppens all the time. But this is precisely the one way t h a ~are Want to distinguish ourselves (we others, the followers of the rnadman): we think thar our opinions are opinions and nothing more. We have seen certain facts. We believe thac this coutd be the reason for it, We (and you may do the same) will perform some other experimencs to verify ehe solidiry of rke opinion. Besides, ir seems to us that chis procedute is not campletely new. Didn't physicists and chrmists often proceed in this way? And we speak rhen about hypothesis, about the scientific method, in a respccaful tone. After all, respect means litcie co us, Let's limit ourselves to the facts: we have seen tihildren and adulrs learn by themselves,

46

Reason Between Epuls

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without a master explicaeor, how to read, wrice, play music, and speak foreign languages. We believe these farts can bc cxplained by the equality of intelligence. This is an opinion whose verification we pursue. It's true there is a difficutty in atl this. Physicists and chernises isolate physical phenomena and relate them to other physical phenomena. They set themselve(; to reproducing the known egecrs by producing their supposcd causes. Such a procedure is forbidden us. We can never say: take two equal minds and place them in such and such a condition. We know intelligence by its effects. But we cannor isoiate it, measure it. We are reduced to rnultipl~ingthe experiments inspired by that opinion. But we can never say: alt intelligence is equai. Br's true. But our probfern isn't proving that all intelligence is equai. It's seeing what can be done undet that supposition. And for this, ie's enough for us that the opinion be possiblethat is, ehat no opposing rruth be proved.

Of Brains and Leaves Preciseiy, say the superior minds. The opposite fact is obvious, That intelligence is unequal is evident to everyone. First of all, in nature, no two beings are idcntical. Look at the leaves falling from the tree. They seem exactly the Same ro you. Look more closely and disabuse yourself, Among ehe thousands of leaves, there are no two alike. individualiry is the law of the worid. And how could this law thar applies tri vegetation not apply afo~tiori to this being so infinitely moie elevaced in the vital hierarchy that is human intelligence? TherQuve, each intelligence is different. Second, there have always been, there always wiji be, rhere are everywhere, beings unequally gifted for inteliectual things: scholars and ignorant ones, intelIigent people and fools, Open minds and closed minds. V e know what is said on the subject: the difference in circumstances, social rnilieu, education . . . Well, let's do an experiment: let's take two children who come from the same rniiiieu, raised in the Same way. Let's rake rwo brothers, put them in che Same sehoof, make

them do the Same exercises. And what wilI we sec? One will du berter than the other. There is cherefore an intrinsic difference, And the difVerence results from this: one of the two is more intelligent, rnore gifted; he Iias More resources than thc other. ?%~refme, you can clearfy see rhat intelligence is unequal. How to respond to this widence?Let's begin at the beginning: with the leaves that superior minds are so fond of. We fully recognize that they are as different as people so minded couild dcsire. W only ask: how does one move from rhe diKerence between leaves to the inequality of intelligence? Xnequalicy is only a kind of difference, and it is not ttie one spoken about in the case of leaves. A feaf is a material tbing while a mind is irnmaterial. Mow can one infer, without paralogism, the properties of che mind frorn the properties of matter? It is truc that this terrain is now trccupied by sotne fierce aduersaries: physiolugiscs. The ptopercies of the mind, according to the most radical of them, are in fact tht: properries of the hutnan brain. Differente and inequality hold sway there just as in the confrguration and funccioning of all rhe other orgnns in rhe human body. The brain weighs this inuch, so intelligcnce is worth that much. Phrenologists arid cranioscopists are busy with all tliis: this man, rhey teil u s , has rhe skull of a genius; this other doesn't have a head for inarhematics. Let's leave these 1ßrott~ber~nt.r co the examination of their protuberances and get down to the serious business. One can imagine a canscquent materialism that would be concerned only with brains, and that could apply to them everything that is applied to material beings. And so, effectively, the propositions of inteilectual emancipation wouid baio nothing but the dreams of bizarre brains, stricken with a particular form of thar oid mental malady called melanchoiia. In rhis case, superior minds-that is tu say, superior brains-would in fact have authority over inferior minds in the same way man has authority over animals. I6 tfiis were simply the case, nobody would discuss the inequality of intelligence, Superior brains tr~ouldnot go to che unnecessary trouble of proving theie superiority over inferior minds-in-

capable, by definition, of understanding rhem. They would be content to dominate rhern. And they wouldn't run inro any obsracles: their rnreliectual superioriry would be demonstrated by the fact of that domination, just like physical superiority. There would be no more need for laws, assemblies, and governments in the golirical order than thete would be for teaching, explications, and academies in the intellectual order. Such is not the case. We have govetnments and laws. We havc superior minds that try to teach and convince inferior minds. What is even stranger, the apostles of the inequaijty of intelligence, in their immense rnajority, dnn't hlieve the physiologists and niake fun of the phrenologists. The superiortty they boasr of can't be rneasured, they believe, by Instruments. Materiaiism would be an easy explanarion for their superioriry, but they make a different case. Their superiority is spiritual. They are spirituaiists, above all, because af their own pood opinion of themselves. They believe in the immaterial and imrnortal soul, But how can something irnmaterial be susceptible ro more or less? This is the superior minds' contradiction. They wanr an irnmortait soul, a mind distinct ftam matter, and they want diiferent degrees of intelligence. But ir's rnatcer that makes differenses. If one insists On inequality, one must accept the theory of cerebrai toci; if one insists on the spiritual principke, one must say that it is thesame intelligence that applies, in different circumstances, to different material objects. But rhe superior minds Want neitlier a superiority that would be only material nor a spirituality thac would make them the equals of rkieir Inferior~.They lay claim to the digerences of rnaterialists in the rnidst of the elevaeion that beIongs to irnmareriality. They paine rhe cranioscopist's skuils with the innzlte gifts of intelligence. And yet they know very well that the shoe pinches, aiid rhcy also know they have to concede something to the inferiors, even if only provisionally. Here, tken, is how they arrange things: ehere is in every man, they say, an irnmaterial soul. This soul permirs even the mosa humble to know the great rruths of g d and evil, of conscience and duty, of God and judgment. In rhis

we are all equai, and we will even cancede that the humble often teach us in these rnatters. Let them be satisfied with this and not prcrend to intellectual capacities that are the privilegeofren dearly paid for-of rhose whose rask is to wacch over tlie general interests of sociery. And don't come back and teil us that these differentes are pureiy social. Look instead at these swo children, who come from ehe Same milieu, taught hy the Same masrers. One succeeds, the other doesn't, Therefote . . . So be it! Let's look rhen at your children and your t b ~ ~ r e . One succeeds better than the other, this is a fktct. 1f he succeeds better, you say, this is beiwirse he is more intelligent. Hcre the explanation becomes obscure. Have you shown another frnct that would be rhe cause of rhe first? Jf a physioiogist found one of tlie brarns ta be narruwer or iighter than the other, rhis wouid be a facr. He coutd therefnre-ize deservediy. But yoii haven't shown us anorhet fact. By saying "He is more intelligent," you have simply summed up the ideas that tell the story of the fact. You have given ir a nnrne. But the name of a fact is not its cause, oniy, at best, irs metaphor The 6rsr time you rold the story of the fact by saying, "IIe succeeds better." In your reteiling of ~t you used another name. "He is more intelfigent." But chere is no more i n the second Statement than in the first. "This man does better than the other becausc he is smarter. That means precisely: he does better because he does better. . . . This , say. 'What is more reyoung man has more r w o ~ ~ c e sthey sources?' I ask, arid they start to teQlrne the story of the two children again; so mort resortrces, I[ say to myself, means in French thc set of faccs X just heard; but ehat expression doesn't explajn them at aB1."" It's impossible, ~herefore,to break out of rhe circle. One must show the cause of the ineqliality, at the risk of borrowing it from the protuberants, or be reduced ro mereiy scating a tautology. The inequality of intelligence explains rhe inequality of intelleccuaf manifestations in the way the iiiutus domnitzgu explains the effects of opium.

50

Reason Betzuee~aEiqr4nl.i

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An Attentive Anima1 We know that a juscification of the equality of intelligence would be equally tautologicsil. We wiil therefore try a different patli: we will talk onty about what we See; we will name facts without pretending to assign them causes. The first fact: "I See that man does things [hat other animals don'r. I call this fact mind, intelligence, as I like; B explain nothing, 1 give a name to what I s ~ e . "I ~can also say that man is a teasonable animal. By that I am registering the Fact that man has an articulated language that he uses eo make words, figures, and comparis8?s for the purposes of communicating his thoughcs to his fellow-men. Second, when H coinpate two individuals, "I See rhat in thefirsg. moments of life, they have absotutely the sanie intelligence; that is eo say, they d a exacely the same things, with rhe same goal, with the same intention. I say that these two humans have equal intelligence, and this phrase, equd inrekIigence, is shorthand fo'or all the facts that L have obsecved watchirig two very young infants." kater, I[ will See different facts. f will confirrn rhat che two minds are no longer doing the sarne things, are not obtaining the Same results. I could say, if X wanted to, thar one's inteiligence is more developed than che other's, so long as I know that, here again, B am only vecounring a new fact . Norhing pseverits me from making a supposition abour all this. I wiil not say that the one's faculties are inferior to the other's. I will onily suppose that ehe two faculties haven't been equally exercised. Nothing proves rhis eo me with certainty. But nothing proves the opposite, It is enoiigh Bor rne to know that this lack of exercise is possibfe, and that many experimenrs attest to it. I wilf thus displace the tautology very siightly. I will not say that he has done less well because he is less inreiligenc. I will say that he has perhaps produced a poorer work betause he has worked more pwriy, that he has not seen well because he hasn't llooked well. I will say thar he has brought less attention CO his work. By this I may not have advanced very far, but far enough,

"

nevertheless, to Lseak out of the circle. Attention is neither rhc skull surrounding the brain nor an occult quality. I t is an immaterial L~ctin its principle, material in its eEects: we have a thousand ways of verifying irs presence, its absence, or its greater or lesser intcnsity. All the excrcises of universal teaching tend toward this. In the end. the inequaiity OB artention is a phenomenon whose possible causes are reasonably suggested to us through experiment. We know why yoting children direcc so similar an inrelligence to exploring their world and learning rheir language. Insrinct and need drive them equally. Yhey all have just ahour the samr needs to satisfy, and they all Want equallg to enter human sociecy enjoying all the advantages and rigbts of speaking heings. And for this, intelligence must not come to a standstifl. The child is surrounded by objects that speak to hin^, all a t once, i n different ianguages; he must srudy them separately and together, rhcy have no relationship and often contradict each other. He can make nothing of all the idtoms In which nature speaks to him-through his eyes, tits touch, through all his senses-simultaneously. He must repeat ciften to remember so many absolurefy arbitrary signs. . What great attention is necessary for all [hat!' This giant step taken, the need becomes less irnperious, rhe artention less coostant, and the child gets used to learning theough the eyes of others. Circumstances becorne diverse, and he develops the intelleceuaf capacities as those circumstance~demand. The Same holds for tlle common peopie. It is useless eo discuss whether their "lesser" intelligehice is an elect of nature or an effeci of society: they develop the tntellrgcnce that the needs and circumstances of their existente demand of them, "shere where neetl ceases, intelligence slumbers, unfess some stronger will rriakes irself' understood and says: concinue; ioitk at what you are doing and what you ccbn do if you apply the same inielligence you have already made use of, by bringing to eack thing the Same arcention, by not letting youtself stray from your path.

6y nn intelligente. P e i h n ~saying that wiils are unequalily demanding sufficcs to explain che differentes in attention that would perhaps sufhce to explain the inequality of rntelfectual performances. l intelligence. This forrnula is heir to Man is U will served by uaa a long history. Summing up the thought of the great eighteenth-century minds, che poet-philosopher Jean Prancois de Saint-karnbert atifirmed: "Man is a living organization served by an intelligence.'' The formula srnacked of rnaterialism, and during the Restoration, the apostle of coiinterrevoiution the Viscount de Bonald, strictiy reversed i t . "Man," he proclaimed, "is an intelligence served by organs."But this reversai caused a v e ~ yainbiguous restoration of the intelligence. What the viscoune disliked about ttie philosopher's formula was not that it gave too srnall a part ro human intelligence; he hirnself didn't grant it much. What he disliked was the republican model of a king at che Service of a collective organization. What he wanted to restore was che good hierarchical order: a king who commands and subjects who obey. The soveretgn intelligence, for him, was certainlly not that of the child or worker, tending to the appropriation of a world of signs; it was the divine inteliigence already inscribed in the codes gtven to man by the divinity, in the very language thar owed its origin neither ro nature nor t o h u m m art, but to the pure gife of God. Huinan will's fot was to subrnit itself to rhar intelligence already manifested, inscrikd in codes, in language as in social institutians. Taking ehis stand broughn: wieh ic a certain paradox. To ensiire the triumph of social objectivity and the objectivity of Language over ehe "individualisr" phitosophy of the Enlightenment, de Bonald had to take up in his turn the most "mareriaiist" formulations of that Same philosophy, In order to deny any anteriotity of thought ovet language, in order to forbid intefligence any right to search for a truth of its own, he had to join u p wirh those who had reduced mental operations to thr pure mechanism of material sensations and Linguistic signs: to rhe point of rnaking fun of those monks on Mounc Athos who,

.

contemplating their navelr, helieved themselves visited by divine inspiration. Tbus that CO-naturalirybetween linguistic signs and the idcas of tinderstanding that tbe eighteenth century snught, and rhac the Ideo1oguc.s worked at finding, fuund itself recuperated, reversed to favor the prirnacy of the established, in rhe frarnework of a theocratic and snciocratic vision of tlie intelligence, ''Man ," wrure thc viscounr, "thinks his speech before speaking his rhoughtl'-a materiaiist theory of language rhat does not allow us ro ignore rhe pious thought thar animares ie: "The faithful and perpetual guardian of the sacred depository of the fundamental trutlis of the social order, society, considered in general, grants knowledge of all rhis to its children as they enter into the big family."" In rhe face of these strong thoughts, an angry hand scratched on his copy these lines: "Compate all this scandalous vcrbiage with the oracle's response on the iearned ignorante of Socrates." It isn't JosephJacotot's hand. I t is rhe hand of de Bonald's colieague in the Chamber, the knight Maine de .Biran, who, a little farther on, reverses rhe viscount's cntire edifice in two lines: the anteriority of linguistic signs changes norhing for the preerninence of the intellecrual act that, for every human infant, giver them meariing; "Man only iearns to speak hy linking ideas tri rhe words he learns frorn his nurse."' At first glance this is an astonishing coincidence. At hrst it is dißicult to see what the ersrwhile Bieutenant of Louis XVl's guard and thc erstwhile army caprain from ~ e iI,r the administrative squire and the professor from the central school, the deputy of the monarch's Chamber and the exiled revolutionary, could possibly have in common. At. ehe most, we might think, the Fact that borh were twenty years oid at che onset of ehe Revolution, that botti lefc the rumult of Paris at twenty-five, and chat both had rneditared rather lengthily arid at a distance on haw much sense and virtue rhe old Socratir axiom rnight have had, or might have now, i n the middle of so many upheavafs. facotot understood the matter more in the rnanner uf the moralists, Maine de Biran rnore rnetaphysicatly. Nevertheless, 'ehere remains a cornrnon vision

that uphoids the Same affirmarion of the prirnacy of thought over iinguistic signs: the Same balance shret of ehe analytic and ideological tradition in which both had formed their thinking. Self-knowiedge and the power of reason aae 110 tonger to be sought in the rcciprocal transprency of linguistic signs and the ideas of understanding. The arbitrariness of the will-revoIricionary and imperial-has now enrirely taken over the promised land of well-made languages that yesterday's reason promised. Thus the certitude of thouglit withdraws beyond che transparencies of language-.whether they be republican ot theocratic. it bears on its own act , on that mental tensian that precedes and orients any combination of signs, The divinity of the revolutionary arld imperial era-the will-finds irs rationaliry at the heart of ehat efforr each puts into himself, that autodetermination of the mind as activity. Incelligence is attention and research hefore being a crpmbination of ideas. W111 is thc power to be moved, ro act by its own movement, before being an instance of choice.

A Will Served by a n Inteiligence It

is this fundamental turnarouiid that ctle new reversal of the

definition of man records: man is a will served dy a n intelfigence.

WiIl is the rational power that must be delivered from thc quatrels between the ideai-ist$ and the tbing-isu. Ir is also in this sense that the Cartesian equality of the c&to must be specified. In place of the tliinking subject who onty knows himself by withdrawing fronl alt the senses and froin ali bodies, we Iiave a new thinking subject who is aware of hirnself through tbe action he exerts on himself as on orher bodies. Here is how jacotot , according to the principles of universal reaching, made his own iranrlntion of Dercartes's famous analysis of thc piece of wax: I Want ro look and I see. 1 Want to listen and I hear. I Want to touch and my arm reaches out, wanders along rhe surfaces of objects or penetrares into their interior; my hanci opens, develops, exterids, closes

hip; my fingers spread out or move togerher by obeying my will. In ttiat acr of rouching, I know only my will cci tuuch. Thac will is neitber rny hand, rtor rny brain, nor my rouching. That will is me, my soul, it is rny power, i t is my faculty. I feel that will, ir i s present i n me, i t is myself; as for rhc tnanner in which I arn obeyed, that f don'r feel, that I only know by its acts. . . . 1 consider ideatioti like rnuching. I have sensatioos when I likc; 1 order my senscs ro bring them tu me. I harre ideas when I like; 1. order rny inrelligence ro look for them, to feel. The hand and the intelligence are slaves, eacli wirb i t s own attributes. Man is a wiI1 cerved by an intelligence.'

I baiue ideds when I like. Descartes knew weit the power of will over understanding. But he knew ir precisely as the power of the false, as the cause of error: the haste to afirt,r when che idea isn't clear and distinct. The opposite must be said: i t is tfie lack of will that causes intelligence to make mistakes. The rnind's original sin is not haste, but distrartion, absence. "Ta act without will or reflection does not produce an intellectual act. Tlie effecc that resul ts from this cannor be ciassed among the producrs of' intelligence, nor can ic be cornpared to them. O n e can see neithet more nor less action in inactivity; there is norhing, Idiocy is not a facuity; ir is the absence or the sIumber or the relaxation of [intelligence] ."R I[ntelligeaice'sact is to seeand to compare whac has been seen. Ir sees at first by chance. Iit muct seek to repeat: t o rreate the conditions to re-sec whar i t has seen, in order to see similar facts, in order co see facts rbat could be the cause of what it has seen. Tt rnust also form words, sentences, and figures, in order to teil othcrs what it has seen. In shcirt, the rnost frequent mode cpf exercising intelligence, much to the dissatisfaction of geniuses, is repetition. And repetition jc boring. The first vice is laziness. It is easier to absent oneself, to half-see, co say what one hasn't seen, to say whar one believes one sees. "Absent" sentences are formed in rhis way, the "rherefores" that trarislate no mental adventure. "I can'r" is one of these absent sentences. ''I can't" is not the name of any fact. Nothing happens in the mind that corresponds to that assertton. Properly speaking, it doesn't

to say anything. Speech is rhus filled or emptied of meaning depending on whether the will cornpels or relaxes the workings oC the inrelligence. Meaning is the work of the will. This is the secret of universai teaching. It i c also the seeret of those we call geniuses: the relentless work to bend the body to necessary habits, CO compel the inrelligence to new ideas, ro new ways of expressing them; to redo on purpose what chance once produced, and ro reverse unhappy circumstances intn occasions for success:

zrtclnt

This is rnie for Orators as for children, The Former are forrned in assemblies as we are Formed in life. . . . He who, by cliance, made people laugh at his cxpense a t rlie last session could learn to get a laugh whenever he wants to were he to study all the relarions thar led to tticguttaws that so disconcerted him arid rnade him close his mouth foreuer. Such was Demosthenes' debut. By making people laugh without meaning to, he learned how he could excite peals of laughter against Aeschines. Ruc Bemosrhenes wasn'r lazy. He couidn't be." Once more universal teaching proclaims: dn individr*.alcdtz iio anything he wanü. But we must not mistakc what wanting

means. Universal teaching is not the key to success gtantecf to the entetprising who exptore the prodigious powers of the wiil. Nothingcould be mure opposed co the thought of emancipatkon rhan that advertising slogan. And rhe Fouiider becarne irrirated when disciptes opened their school under the slogan, "Whoevet wants ro is able to." The only slogan that had value was "The equality of inrelligence." Universal teaching is not an expedienc method. Ic is undoubtedly true that the arnbirious and the conquerors gave ruthless illustracion of it, Theib: passion was an inexhaustible source of ideas, and they quickly understood how to direct generais, scholars, or financiers faultlessly in sciences thcy rhemselves did not know, But what interests us is not this theatrical effect, Whar the arribitious gain i n ehe way of intellectual power by not judging themselves inferior to anyone, they tose by judging themsefves superior ro everyone else. What ineerests us is the exploration of tfie powers of any man when he judges himself equal to everyctne else and judges evetyune

else equal ro him. i3y the will we mean that self--refiection by the reasonable being who knows himself in rhe act. Ir is this threshold of rationality, this consciousness of and esreem for the seff as a reasonable being aceing, that nourishes the movemene of the inrelligence. Tlie reasonabie being is first of all a being who knows his power, who doesn't lie to himself about ir.

The Principle of Veracity There are rwo fundamental lies: the one that proclaims, "I am tclling the truth," and the one that states, "I cantiut say." The reasonable being who retlects on himself knows the emptiness of these two propositions. Thc hrst fact is the impossibility of not knowing aneself. The individual cannor lie to himself; he tan only forget hirnseif. "1 can't" is rhus a sentence of self-forgetfuiness, a sentence ftom which the reasonable ind ividuaI has withdrawn. No evif genie can iriterpose hirriself between conscio~isnessand its act. We must therefore reverse Socrates's adage. "No one is voiunrarily bad," he said. We will say the opposite: "All blunders come from vice.'"" No one makes an error except hy waywardness, that is to say, by laziness, by rhe desire to no longer listen to what a reasonable hcing w e s hiinself. The principle of evil lies not in a mistaken knowledge of the good chat is the purpose of action. It lies in ~infairhfulness to oneself, "Know yourself" no longer means, in rhe Platoriic manner, know wheire your good Lies. It means come back eo yourself, to what you know to be unmistakably in you. hour humility is norhing btit the proud fear of stumbling in ftonc of others. Stumbling is nothing; che wrong is in diverging from, leaving one's yath, no longer paying attention to whac one says, forgecting what une is. So foliow yogr path, Thls principle of veracity is at the hearr nf the emancipation experience. I t is nor the key to any science, but the privileged ~elationof each Person to the ttuth, the orie that piits him on his path, on his orbit as a seeker. I[t is the rnoral foundation of the power to know. This ethical foundation of rhc very abilicy

to know is still a thought of its time, a fruic of the meditation on rcvolutionary and imperial experience. But the majarity of the thinkerc of the time undersrood i e in ttie opposite way ro Jacotot. For them, the truth that commands intellectual agreernent was to be identified with che iink that keeps men united. Truth is what brings together; error is rupture and solitude. Society, its institutions, the goal ie pursues-these are what define the desire with which the individual must ideneify in order to reach a correct pereeption. Tlius reasoned de Bonald the theocrat, and, after him, Philippc Buchez rhe socbalist and Auguste Cornte the positivist. The eclectics, with their common sense and their grand trurhs written in the heart of each Person, be he philosopher ur shoemaker, were less severe. But: all were men of aggregation. And Jacotot departed from them On rhis point. 8 n e can say, if one likes, that rrttth brings rogerher. But whnr. brings people together, what unites chem, is nonaggregation. Let's rid ourselves of the representation of rhe social remeet thar hardened the thinking minds of tl-ie postretrolutionary age. People are united because they are people, that is ro say, distck~t beings. Language doesn'r unite them. O n the contrary, i r is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to comniunicate by forcing them to transiate--hut also puts them in a community of intelligence. Man is a being thar knows very well when someone speaking daesn'c ltnow whae he is talking abour. Truth doesn't bring people together at all. It is not given tu us. It exists independentiy from us and does not submic to our piecemeal sentences. 'Truth exists by itself; ic is that which is an$ not that which is said. Saying depends on man, but the truch does not.'"' But for ali thar, eruth is not foreißn COus, and we are not exiled from its country. The experience of veraciry attaches ris to its absent cencer; ir rnakes us circle around its foyer. First of all, we can see and indicate truths. Thus, "B taught wfiat I didn't know" is a truth. Ir's the name of a fact that existed, that can be repioduced. As for the reason for this fact, that is for the moment an opinion, and it may always rcmain so. Bur with that oginion, we are circfing around the

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truth, from fact to facr, relarion ro retation, sentence to sencence. What is essential is toavoid lying, not rnsay thar we havc seen sornerhing wfien we've kept our eyes closed, not to helievc ehat sornething has been explaincd tu us when it has only been named . Thus, each one of us describes our parahola around the truth, No two orbits are alike. An$ this is why rtie expf icators endanger our revolucion. These orbits of humanitarian conceptions rasely inrersect and have only a few points i n cornmon. The lurnbled ltnes tliat they describe nevcr coincide withoiir a Jisturbance thac suspends Iiberty and, consequently, the use of the intelligence thar fotlows from it. The student fcels that , on his own, he wouldn't have foliowed the roure he has jus t been led down; and he forgers rhat there are a thousand partis i n incellectuai space Open ta his v~ill.l 2

This coincidence of orbits is whar we have called stultificatiari. And we understand why stultificaticjn is ali the more profound, rhr rnore subtle, the less perceptible, rhe coincidence. This is why the Sacratic method, apparentiy so close to universal reaching, represenrs the rnost formidable form of stultification. The Socratic method oF interrogation rhat prcrends to lead ehe student to his w n knowledge is in fact the merfiod of a ridingschool master: He ordets turns, marches, and countermarches. As for hin, dusing ttie training sessioit hc is relaxed and has the dignicy of arithority over the mind he direcrs. From derour to detour, the srudenr's mind arrives at a fitiish that couldri't even be glirnpsed a t rhe starting line. He is surprised to rouch i t , he turns around, he sees his guide, the surprise turns into adrniration, and that admiration stultifies tiim. The student feels chat, a h n e and abandaned to himseif, he wo~ildnot have followed ttiat route.

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No orie has a relationship to the rruth if he is not on his own orbit. But Iet no one, for ali that: gloat about bis singulariry and go out, in his turn, to proclaim: Anlict6.r Platt, sed ~nagis amzm t i ~ v i t ~ r sThat ! is a Iine fi-om rhc rheater. Aristotle, who said i t , was doing nothing different f r o ~ nPlato. Like him, he was

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Renson Between Eqwis

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stating his opinions, he was telling the Story of his inrellectua1 adventures; on the way, he gathered a few truths. As for the truth, it doesn't rely on phifosophcrs who say they are its friend: it is only friends wirk itself.

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Reason and Eanguage Truth is not told. IIt is a whole, and language fragments it; it is necessary, and languages are arbitrary. I t was this thesis on the arbitrariness OE languages-even more than the proclamation of universal teaching-that made Jacotot's teaching scandalous. In x 818, in his very first course at Ilauvain, he took .nc his rheme this question, inherited frorn the eighteenth century of Diderot and the Abbe Batteux: is "direct" construcrion, the one that places the noun before the verb and the attribute, the natural conscruction? And did French writers have the right to consider that construction a mark of their language's inteilectual superiority? He decided negatively, With Dideroc, he judged the "inverred" order to be as natural as the so-called natural order, if not mote so; and he beiieved the language of Sentiment preceded that of analysis. But he attacked above alt the very idea of a natural order and the hierarchies it might entail. All languages were equally arbitrary. There was no language of intelligente, no language more universal chan others. The response didn't take Iong. I n the next issue of L'Qbservdteur befge, a literary journaf out of Brussels, a young philosopher by the name of Yan Meenen denounced the thesis as a theoretical warning to the oligarchy. Five years later, after the publication of Langue mczternelie, a young Iawyer ciose to Van Meenen who had takenJacotor's Courses and even published his notes, got angry ip turn. In his Essai sz~rfe k2~f-e de Monsreur]dcotot, Jean Cylvain Van de Weyer scolded this French professor who, after Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Harris, B;ondillas, Dumarsais, Rousseau, Destutt de Eacy, and de Bonaid, still dared co maincain that thought preceded language. The position of thcse young and passionate contradictors rs

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easy to understand. They represented rhe young Belgium, patriotic, liberal, and Frencfi-speaking, in a state of intellectual insurrection against Flernish dornination. To destroy the hierarchy of languages and the universality of the French language was, for them, to give the prize to the language OE the Flemish oligarchy, the backward language of che Iess-civilized part of the population, but also the secrer language of power. Following them, the Co~