The Economics Of Education
that logic is a better basis of certainty than belief which can only generate conviction? When reason was abused — and made into a fetish, into a basis for an unreasonable religion like those it debased in order to replace them — the disabused self was open to a new revelation. It discovered the universe of social relations. And intellectuals entered a new absolute, the social absolute which became a field of exploration for 100 years and more, and is still lingering among us. Men exchanged their time for social experience, for the creation of the instruments which not only made possible the grasp of this newly invented reality but made that reality the absolute. The era of institutions and of institutionalizations came about. Our modern world is full of them and not only in the “Western World” — where they were born and intensely cultivated at first — but everywhere on earth, taken there by colonialism and the imperialisms of all colors. Modern man is now at work on the threshold of a new absolute which we may call earthian in consciousness, but intuitive in character. Many men and women are now exploring how to maintain complexity at the center of their preoccupations and to develop the means of handling it in all the walks of life and all its manifestations. Time itself is perceived in its complexity and richness, rather than as a coordinate as it has been in physics and in the other sciences which borrow their time from it. Time as experience has surfaced and can now be studied in its evolution through one individual’s life and that of collectivities and given its true complexion.* We can now not only think properly of time, we can begin to see how all the gains we made through all the successive absolutes can be concentrated in making us use our lifetime for our best interest.
*
cf. My seminar transcript in French “Sur le Temps” Vols.1-4,1981.
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