No longer keen to learn?
Presented by Robert Maggiori, philosopher, founding member
Denis Kambouchner, philosopher
At first glance, one might think that learning has nothing to do with desire, if desire is to want to have or do what another has and does, which I don't have and which I am incapable of doing. For there to be desire, there must be "something" that is not me, an otherness. From then on, learning, when it does not depend on necessity - I am forced to learn the rules of the road and the meaning of road signs if I want to drive a car - could depend rather on will, and not on desire. Yet it happens that one admits "having no desire for anything", not even to desire, and finds oneself in such apathy that one even tires of carrying one's body and lets one's mind drift, adrift. One then has a sort of general collapse of will, an abulia that prevents going anywhere, and above all prevents going towards what is new, towards what one will discover, towards what one does not know - which is what learning consists of. Such indifference to everything seems to have spread these days, and no doubt it has reinforced itself in the idea that, from now on, everything there is to know is there, available in an instant, a click - and that it is therefore no longer useful to learn, since I can know without having, of myself, learned anything.
