«…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 development, and an ending. Learning to improvise was first of all learning to overcome oneself, to overcome the 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 oneself to their judgment. And after that it was learning to begin and to end, to make a totality, 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 Flight of a Fly.” Hilarity erupted in the classroom, but Jacotot was clear: this was not about laughing, it was about speaking. And the young student spoke for eight and a half minutes on this airy subject, saying charming things and making graceful, freshly imaginative connections…
…But one cannot reach an agreement through words about the meaning of words. One man wants to speak, the other wants to figure it out, and that’s that. From this agreement of wills there results a thought visible to two men at the same time. At first it exists immaterially for one of them; then he says it to himself, he gives form to it with his eyes or his ears, and finally he wants that form, that material being, to reproduce for another man the same primitive thought. These creations or, if you will, these metamorphoses are the effect of two wills helping each other out. Thought thus becomes speech, and then that speech or that word becomes thought again; an idea becomes matter, and that matter becomes an idea—and all this is the effect of the will. Thoughts fly from one mind to another on the wings of words. Each word is sent off with the intention of carrying just one thought, but, unknown to the one speaking and almost in spite of him, that speech, that word, that larva, is made fruitful by the listener’s will; and the representative of a monad becomes the center of a sphere of ideas radiating out in all directions, such that the speaker has actually said an infinity of things beyond what he wanted to say; he has formed the body of an idea with ink, and the matter destined to mysteriously envelop a solitary immaterial being actually contains a whole world of those beings, those thoughts…
…We have seen reasonable individuals crossing over the bounds of linguistic materiality in order to signify their thought to one another. But this interchange is possible only on the basis of the inverted relation that submits the union of intelligences to the laws of any grouping, those of matter. Here we have the material hinge of stultification: immaterial minds cannot be linked together except by making them submit to the laws of matter. The free orbit of each intelligence around the absent star of the truth, the distant flight of free communication on the wings of the word, is found to be thwarted, driven off course by universal gravitation toward the center of the material universe. Everything happens as though the intelligence lived in a double world. And maybe we should give some credit to the Manichean hypothesis: Manicheanism saw disorder in creation, and explained it by the meeting of two kinds of intelligence. It’s not simply that there is a principle of good and a principle of evil. More profoundly, it’s that two intelligent principles don’t make one intelligent creation. At the moment when the Viscount de Bonald proclaimed the restoration of divine intelligence, manager of language and of human society, some men of progress were tempted to revive, in opposition, the hypotheses of the heretics and the Manicheans. They compared the powers of intelligence at work in scholars and inventors with the sophistries and disorders of deliberative assemblies, and willingly saw in this the action of two antagonistic principles. This is how it was for Jeremy Bentham and his disciple James Mill, witnesses of the madness of English conservative assemblies, as well as for Joseph Jacotot, witness of the madness of French revolutionary assemblies…”
Contributed by
Pietro Gaglianò