After a whole week studying definitions and roughly a hundred pages filled with philosophical stuff, the exam period started. Today, it opened with what I consider the biggest and toughest exam among all others, namely
Introduction à la philosophie générale.
Since I had worked very hard for the course, I was pretty confident about the exam. There was an oral and a written part. The oral exam was to take place at 8.30, and the written one at 2 pm.
I arrived at 7.50, just to be on the safe side. Several classmates talked about the difficulties they had had to study the course; soon, it was time for me to meet the professor,
révérend-père Etienne Ganty. I entered the classroom quietly. Without a word, the professor (a man with a
combover coming from the right side of his head – which is rare) pointed a small box with yellow pieces of paper in it. I guessed I should pick one of them. I took one with "3" on it. I took a questionaire with more than a dozen of questions and some scrap paper to write my rough draft. I had to develop this: "What distinguishes the men from all other beings, according to
Aristotle?" It was not so difficult. I wrote evrything I knew on the subject in order.
Meanwhile, two other students were tested by Pr. Ganty. It wasn't looking very fine for them… Was I going to be destroyed, too?
The time had come: I came and sit in front of the Combover. I tried not to pay attention to it – otherwise I would have started laughing for several minutes or so… So, I talked about the question, introducing the subject, making links, etc. While I was speaking, he was writing several words on a sheet of paper. When I was done with Aristotle, he asked me two questions: one about
Kant and his imperatives, plus the so-called "effort moteur volontaire". He didn't interrupt me to say I was saying bullshits; besides, at the end he said: "Très bien". All this gives me a good feeling about this.
In the afternoon – it means that I went back to my student's room to change clothes, because a suit is nice but warm – I went back to university to take the written part. It was pretty easy, actually. But it was maybe because I knew the stuff very well (surely I had to, after one whole week of studying!).
And now, I can forget everything. Oh no, it's already done! I pressed the delete button in my memory, and everything linking to this course was (hopefully) dragged away in the flushing power of oblivion. (Yeah I know, when I try to make comparaisons, it sucks.)
What we had to study was boring philosophy. Of course, there's greater boredom than that. Father Ganty could have given us a lecture on Heidegger. There's something I found on
his page on Wikipedia:
Philosophers are divided in their opinion of Heidegger: some regard him as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, while others view his writing as bombastic nonsense. [!!!!!]
Nonetheless, his work has exercised a deep influence on philosophy, theology and the humanities, being key to the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodernism, and Continental philosophy in general. [Comment: What the heck is that?]
Heidegger's thought directly informs the works of major philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. [Comment: A bunch of people who could have done something better of their lives than talking gibberish.]
Heidegger infamously supported National Socialism. [Comment: What a prick!!]
This has provoked fierce debate among and between supporters and detractors: some see it as a personal folly largely irrelevant to his philosophy, while others think it reveals flaws inherent in his thought.As we say in French:
On l'a échappée belle !" And there's worse than what I put up there: scroll down on the article and be amazed by things you won't understand a single word of!!!
I'm the advocate of another kind of philosophy: that of the Internet users. It's simple, you can discuss other people's ideas, react by all sorts of means, from the simple e-mail to the video response. Blogs are great, too: you can show the entire world (and not just a small group of "philosophers" who chose the most unintelligible words so that people like you and I don't get access to their "knowledge" they think beter than ours) your own philosophy. As a result, my blog is a kind of
textbook about me. Silly, I know.
As I was looking for videos about Star Wars, I stubbled upon this girl and her lovely video.
Vous m'en direz des nouvelles ! As embedding was disabled for this video,
I suggest you just click here in order to watch it. Have fun! And think about the message!
I'm too ashamed to say how I came to find this picture, but I did find it on the Internet. This photograph, probably taken round 1985, shows two Belgian politicians.
