- I grew up in a small mountain until my 9 years old, so for the most important part of the childhood, where, I think, the child construct himslef / herself. During those years I had the feeling to live with the nature, not to be an intruder. And I think it is because every child is a new human, without knowing all the construction of the society he / she lives in and he / her just takes for reality the environnement he / she is living in. So my relationship to nature until my 9 years old was pure, and it changed when I mooved out from there, to the city. So I’m deeply believing the actual relationship humans have to the world, which is based on the exploitation of the nature, where we are deconnected from it, is not innate and we still can reconnect with it witout regress. So I’ll try to have a reflexion here about it with of course some sources to built it.
Humanity, in its process of virtualization, never stops to prove its extraordinary plasticity but at the same time, their exploitation comes at a very heavy price. The economic changes already have reverberated on the spirituality (a relation to the world, a feeling of being) and on the psyche (the own forces). If those repercussions are of the order of the collapse, it is not by accident, insofar as the economic system is supported all on the unlimited exploitation of the resources like the « human resources » are, and like any real thing, they are limited. This leads us to say that capitalism highlights the capacity of the human being to go beyond their strengths. It is in this sense that we can speak of a « liberated » humanity (it responds less than ever to the sole « force of things ») and at the same time profoundly alienated (it ends up forgetting that it has become distant and separated from itself). Moreover, the « liberation » finally produced by capitalism generates a general suffering, humans are separated from themselves and from the world, from nature, strangled, exhausted, from the world itself.
It is now a matter of considering the prospects for reconstruction. The damage that has been done and continues to be done is so deep that a quick political solution may seem out of reach (unless there is a radical political change to a form of ecological authoritarianism). And there is no obvious economic solution without causing a collapse. But there is something resilient in humans, something that probably cannot be completely amputated, something like a link with the world that cannot be totally undone. Perhaps because even in a context of our virtualization, we continue to live our lives bodily, and our bodies lead us back to the flesh of the world. There are some individuals who change their life, who commit themselves and who prove that one can leave, certainly still at the margin, almost completely the capitalist system, without making of its life a desert. But this can only come from a personal, profound decision, impossible to prescribe.
But there is a breach that we can now step forward, each child that comes into the world is entirely new. This newness, which is also a plasticity, is open to all possibilities. It is what makes children enter without detour, very young, in the technological modernity. But it is also what can make alternative experiences possible. It is a question of being always attentive to the temptation: to raise a child by cutting him off from the world strongly risks producing a catastrophe, by making him dependent on an isolated will and unconscious of its own arbitrariness.
I’ve readen an article of Renaud Hetier, and for him for all children to be reached, we would have to think of integrating spiritual and psychic reconstruction in a school setting. But the influence of the school is rather limited, at least if it remains tied to formal programs and restrictive schedules (where it is life experiences that the child needs). Moreover, the risk is to make experiences that will input a doctrine, or a moral. In both cases it goes over the head of the children, at worst, it makes them react (in a transgressive mode already so widespread among adults). If we leave it to the families, we should be able to start by educating the parents, making them aware of a reunion with the world beyond overconsumption, hyper-communication and advanced virtualization. So, there is no « global » solution in education either.
On the other hand, there is, as Maria Montessori and Heinrich Pestalozzi before her, an authentic sensitive availability in all children (including the most disadvantaged, often those whose parents do not offer sufficient support). Therefore, it is perhaps not necessary to think of a total and closed system, where for example the child would be completely immersed in nature. A few alternative experiences are likely to be inscribed in the child’s sensitive memory and to make him or her seek out these experiences on their own. What we can trust is the strength of experiences that inscribe the child in an intense feeling of the world, experiences that other mediations (current entertainment, in particular) cannot completely cover. Such a sensitive experience is indeed a base which will support the necessary abstract apprehension of the problems on the scale of the earth, an « abstract sensibility ».
The problem that needs to be addressed from childhood would be to establish a deep relationship with the world and to have the strength to resist the temptation of unlimitedness. To resist durably is only possible if we can develop the strength from a relationship with the world that supports us. And this relationship, symmetrically, can only be initiated if we extract ourselves from what the capitalist society sells as compensation. In other words, it is a question of freeing a certain desire (the one to reinforce our relationship with the world) from the unlimited needs created by our economic system. It is what will lead to a critical analysis of the enjoyment, understood as a beyond of the pleasure, a pleasure exceeded by the very perspective of the unlimitedness.
As the question of the destruction of the world and of humanity, by their overexploitation, is in the background of our preoccupation, the link cannot fail to be made between enjoyment and destruction. This link is strongly marked, since Freud, in psychoanalysis. However, the jouissance of which Freud speaks is not the one that is destroying the world. There is, therefore, a necessity to split two forms of jouissance between them: the jouissance of unlimitedness and that of destruction.
Our spiritual and psychic collapses make us look for compensations in overconsumption, hyper-communication and advanced virtualization, which at the same time separate us from the world, exhaust this world and maintain us in these collapses. The issue is then of finding support elsewhere than in these compensations and we can hope to find it in us, in a force of being, in a desire of being. But we cannot close ourselves in on ourselves, at the risk of exhausting ourselves in our turn. We also need external support. This external support, it is a question of finding it in the being of the world, if we manage to dispose ourselves to receive it fully (with paying enough attention to it). Then, we will have the resources, moreover, to support the world in our turn, so an education must take care to cultivate forces of resistance to them, forces of support.
The problem is that in the social reality, humans are denatured. From childhood, they disturb the desire of humans and prevents them from finding satisfaction in (simply) being. By satisfying the desires of the child, at the same time one lets him exercise a power (on the adults) and one lets his « desire » exorb. It could be a question of « curbing jouissance », as Jacques Lacan formulated it. It is a question of « indirect intervention, not at all in the mode of an « authority » with arbitrary restrictions, but in the mode of a certain balance. Enjoyment, understood with first needs mediations, in order not to leave the child to his excitement and to his impulses alone. But there are different mediations. Certain mediations to excite the child and to fan his desire for consumption and it is not only a question the educator withdraws. It is not the child to be withdrawn itself like expropriated or detached from the world, but the child’s environment that must ensure the necessary desaturation.
It is particularly important to give the child the time to be, to feel himself to be and to feel the being of the world of which he is a part. The human nature is there, and it is less a question, considering the weight of the social conformation, of an original state than of an original state of the individual. The « feeling of being », founded by a certain spiritual experience, this first stage is likely to allow the individual, from childhood, to feel supported by this world. One will be able to explore then the construction of « own forces », psychic forces, which claims more than an education, an arrangement of the childhood. A possibility of solitude, an exposure to time, without which there is neither being or desired to be and a commitment in and with the life, process of creation.