France is the country that produced the Enlightenment, Descartes’s one-liner, “I think, therefore I am,” and the solemn pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and other celebrity philosophers.
But in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet.
In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”
“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”
Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich.
It’s not that the French think too much, it’s that they think about nonsense that is the problem. Foucault, Derrida, Sartre…does anyone believe the gibberings of these cretins merit the slightest thought by any sane person?
A Frenchman in London explained to me that the French think differently and this comes from their education. He gave me this example:
Give a problem to an Englishman and he will say ‘give me all the facts, I will examine them in detail and I will tell you the answer’. The Frenchman will say ‘how ridiculous, you can never know all the facts’.
Give a problem to a Frenchman and he will say ‘let us create a hypothesis and then test our hypothesis against the facts, and if the facts do not fit we will amend the hypothesis’. The Englishman will say, ‘how dishonest!’
[i]Give a problem to a Frenchman and he will say ‘let us create a hypothesis and then test our hypothesis against the facts, and if the facts do not fit we will amend the hypothesis’. [/i]
Human cause global warming alarmists are FRENCH???
oh, wait, I thought it said “we will amend the FACTS”. never mind.
“it’s that they think about nonsense that is the problem”
They don’t just think about nonsense. They also think about cheese and Germans.
If the French will roll up their sleeves and cook, the whole world will be a better place for it.
I find libraryjim’s honest admission in #4 that he mis-read #3, refreshing. I wonder if it is typically modern-American to read words that are not even there; I fear it is becoming so. That wouldn’t bode well for assembling all the facts for the Englishman’s reasoning process…….
“Foucault, Derrida, Sartre…does anyone believe the gibberings of these cretins merit the slightest thought by any sane person?”
Well . . . there are those American humanities professors.
So Lagarde’s basic point is to approach the proposed tax cut pragmatically rather than ideologically.
Don’t let the Germans off the hook.
Hegel and the extrapolators of his philosophy have helped cause much of the misery in the world over the past two hundred years or so.
#9 – I feel a song coming on ….
‘Heidegger, Heidegger was a drunken beggar…’