Roger-Pol Droit (1949-) is a philosopher, a researcher at the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique and a columnist for the French daily Le Monde. Following on his successful book La Compagnie des Philosophes, he compiled a volume entitled 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life
Instructions are set down on experiencing a variety of unusual situations, such as eating a nameless substance, rowing in a lake in your room, telephoning at ramdom, running in a graveyard. Amongst them is one exercise inviting the reader to enter into a mood of levity and gusty irreverence for staid sacred cows -
25 Play The Fool
Duration: 30 to 40 years
Props: a complex society
Effect: joyful
...Act slantwise. Move like the bishop in chess – systematically diagonal. Walk crablike and crossways. Day in day out, meeting no resistance. Make it a habit to seek the least appropriate, most incongruous answer to any question. Apply it from time to time, and see what happens.
The longest and hardest thing about playing the fool is arriving at the realisation that truly nothing is serious. Occupy the horizon, the point of convergence where absolutely everything becomes, in a sense, laughable: existence, death, humanity, love, the universe, ants, writing, money, careers, bodies, thought, politics. Among other things. Not forgetting laughter itself, and hilarity, and court jesters.
From 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit
0 comments:
Post a Comment