Instead of multiple instructions for change, a philosopher
who presents the show “Le Souffle de la pensee” of France Culture, prefers to develop the idea of metamorphosis. Inconspicuous, but always active behind the scenes of our lives.
“That’s right, I can’t change myself…” This is the conclusion I heard at the end of an argument. I said this sentence without thinking about it, desperate, it was my last bullet, which I fired hoping to kill my opponent.
And it worked… Because what can you say to someone who tells you that he is like that and nothing else, that he cannot change himself, that he will never change? No continuation is possible when the final point of “I am like that” is gone. But as pleasant as my victory was, it was as unbearable to me; have I really become the person who declared like an old man? “We are not getting together again.” Had I reached that critical age when the future (with its advances and developments) was behind me?
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Age of clairvoyance Or perhaps I had rather reached the age of discernment where, disgusted by years of good decisions, to-do lists
and other absurdities determined with pen in hand, we finally give up rebuilding ourselves, as we repair an old hut, by wishes and self-suggestions. Am I finally freed from this directive to change, where willpower, discipline and perseverance seem to be enough for us?
This plan seemed ideal… only that it was ideal. In his Essay on the Direct Data of Consciousness, Bergson describes these walks we take every day: houses, streets, windows always look the same to us. Yet, says he, let us think of the first times we saw them, the first impressions we felt, and we shall see it; there was a “unique, inexplicable and above all inexplicable change”… “How they lived. and how I have grown old.’
New rages
● “Essay on the Direct Data of Consciousness”, Henri Bergson ● “In the Shadow of Blooming Young Girls”, Marcel Proust.
This is because, unable to end change, we must end the word “change” in favor of the much more poetic word “metamorphosis.” Because metamorphosis never targets just one thing, just one trait, but involves the entirety of our being. Proust, a great reader of Bergson, learned his lesson well by describing this “I am doomed to die” like it or not, “cutting us off from ourselves every moment” and on which “mobile news will multiply.” »
“La Force du mou”, Géraldine Mosna-Savoie, Editions de l’Observatoire, 160 p., €17.
n/a / Press Photo:
Source: Le Figaro
