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This review has been accessed times since May 15, 2009

Rey, Olivier. (2006). Une Folle Solitude : Le Fantasme de l'Homme Auto-construit [A Foolish Solitude: The Fantasy of the Self-made Man]. Paris : Le Seuil Pp. 329         ISBN 9782020863803

Reviewed by Olivier Renard
Research Council, Sultanate of Oman

May 15, 2009

A mundane observation serves as the starting point of this tour de force: the design of baby strollers changed in the late 1970s, with the new view being to let the infant face the world rather than being confronted to the parent's image, typically the mother’s. This sudden modification illustrates what the author sees as the folly of a system dominated by the belief in not only autonomy but also self-construction. References from science-fiction, mythology, art history, psychology, the Bible and other tales are plentiful in Olivier Rey's A Foolish Solitude; and the message is developed into an ambitious demonstration of the impossibility of self-building oneself, exactly as Baron Munchausen could not have escaped from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair (or bootstraps, depending on who tells the story).

The fact that self-construction of the self is impossible does not create in and by itself a problem, but the trouble comes in when social practices seem to ignore this impossibility and even argue that it may be otherwise. God being dead and the world disenchanted, techno-scientific and democratic principles have filled the gap left by disappearing social traditions. In particular, education science is furthering the destruction of what was needed for the little human being to become structured. Left on their own in a consumerist society that is eager to serve their every need, adults are no longer occupied by anything other than their unbridled fantasies.

The extremely well-researched journey starts with an anthropological detour around two themes. First is the necessary departure from an attachment to both oneself and the first "other" (the mother) based on the authority of a third party. The universal prohibition of incest and parricide are thoroughly reviewed as Rey argues that basic interdictions are not meant to constrain man but to provide him with the psycho-cultural support he needs to develop into an adult. The second theme concerns the sense of causality gained from genealogy, the negation of which leads to a potential destruction of reason as the distinguishing characteristic of humans. Through different, complex means, children come to understand that they are caused by their parents, themselves caused by their own parents. The learning process opening up to a deep understanding of the causality principle, and hence to rationality, is, in Rey’s argument, based on the discovery of the genealogical sequence. Pretend that there is no link between generations and you will end like the mythic Uroboros, the circular self-devouring snake.

The author then uses science fiction as an illustration that reveals archaic passions issuing from the birth trauma and the anxiety of death, fears that science, notably genetic and medically assisted procreation, proposes to address and perhaps solve. James Cameron’s Terminator provides the unsurpassed example of a story in which a man self-generates through a special envoy into the past, with the father being eliminated in the process. Such stories substitute machines for animals and ogres that appear in traditional tales, and give evidnce of unconsciousness-driven quest. In our contemporary psyche, bio-science will free us entirely from the genealogical burden and our shameful sexual origins.

Although science in general happily contributes to this tendency―quite often with an unbridled, market-based enthusiasm―it is education science that attracts its fair share of criticism. Referring to Kant, for whom education cannot be a science but an art because man is free and hence is opaque, Rey insists that human reason cannot be a scientific object, even if, paradoxically, freedom is acquired through education. A large part of contemporary theory, according to the author, aims at freeing educational actions from any form of authority in order to promote children’s self-construction. The structuring power of educational institutions is set aside and replaced by methods that favor a spontaneous development based on the child’s autonomous confrontation with the objective reality of the world. The teacher as a coach, a facilitator, must do what mothers are doing with baby strollers: not get in the way.

In a cruel comparison, Rey confronts Piaget’s prescriptions with The Lord of the Flies’s author, Golding. The latter explains that it took him half a lifetime, two world wars and years with children to write a tale of teenagers stranded on a deserted Pacific island. After the initial satisfaction from an unexpected liberty, the small society quickly sinks into chaos, violence, and fear. The general bloodshed is only avoided by the arrival of an adult. Arguing that the pre-teenagers had been corrupted by their early years in civilization would be misleading, Rey argues: remembrance of former rules is one of the only sources of salvation or at least of the temporary delay of carnage. “After all, we are not savages we are English and the English are good at everything.” Without even commenting, Rey throws Piaget’s thought against the fictional tale and quotes the father of developmental psychology: “Only a social life among the students themselves—that is self-government taken as far as possible and parallel to the intellectual work carried out in common—will lead to this double development of personalities, masters of themselves and based on mutual respect.”

Overall, many debates on education, authority or the weakening of the social link boil down to a quarrel between two schools of thought. For one, the individual is ready at birth: the goal is to free him from those things that constrain self-expression. The normative prescription is to escape the past and the oppressive authority of past generations. This is what Rey calls the fantasy of the self-made man. The other approach assumes that that individual is to be made, cultivated, educated: individuals are not born free, they are destined to freedom. As a professor of mathematics at France’s Ecole Polytechnique who also teaches philosophy at Sorbonne University, Olivier Rey offers a welcome and authoritative argument for the second approach in line with Illich’s and Arendt’s philosophy of education.

Preempting accusations of conservatism, reactionism, or even passéism, the young author affirms that he does understand that the past has never succeeded, that "before" was no better; but this in itself makes it necessary for individuals and societies to keep tradition in mind. To forget the past would lead to hitting the same wall and the reproduction of what did not work before.

About the Reviewer

Olivier Renard is an advisor to the Secretary General of the Research Council in the Sultanate of Oman. He has been a consultant on innovation systems and research strategies. He has consulted with corporations and regulators in many jurisdictions in Europe, Australasia, Latin America and the Middle East, applying microeconomic analysis to networks and infrastructures.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Gustavo Fischman, Melissa Cast-Brede

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