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A French university cultivates learning for learning's sake
By Brad Spurge on International Herald Tribune

Monday, October 15, 2007

Western higher education traces its origins to a couple of private homes with back gardens quite close to each other in ancient Athens. Both schools accepted students free of charge and women, but one was far more radical than the other: it admitted slaves. That was Epicurus's Garden, which taught an ascetic form of hedonism to impart personal happiness and fulfillment for its own sake.

The other, Plato's Academy, much like modern formal systems of education, aimed to help students improve their careers within society - primarily as politicians.The Academy, which taught Plato's idealistic philosophy, had the longer-lasting influence. Still, Epicurean schools spread across the ancient world and lasted for about 600 years - until Christianity began to take offense, classifying their teachings as hedonistic excess.
Lost from view under the weight of ecclesiastical disapprobation was that Epicureanism captured much of the materialist, atomist view of the world that science would later confirm.

When Michel Onfray, France's best-selling philosopher and best-known atheist, decided five years ago to end a 20-year formal teaching career to open his own private university, he chose to re-establish the Epicurean way of teaching.

Onfray, 48, who calls his philosophy an "ethical hedonism," named his school in Caen after the Université Populaire, or Popular University, created more than a century ago in reaction to the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus affair. But the real model goes back to the "alternative" Greek philosopher."My ideal," Onfray said, "is a post-modern Garden of Epicurus.
"On Monday at an auditorium in a suburb of Caen, 200 kilometers, or 125 miles, northwest of Paris, Onfray and 11 of his professors inaugurated the sixth academic year of his Epicurean garden.

Founded as an act of intellectual reaction against the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme rightist politician, in the second round of the 2002 French presidential elections, the Popular University of Caen is open to all, free of charge, with no enrollment, no need for prior academic credentials, no course work, no required reading and no tests.
Nor, like Epicurus's Garden, does it award any diplomas or have any practical purpose other than as a design for living and as a means to enlighten society. The courses are taught by volunteer professors, whose costs - like travel expenses for those who live far from Caen - are paid for by sponsors. These include the France Culture radio station, Hachette Books, the local regional council and the auditoriums and theaters where the courses are taught, including the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen.

The school has become a major attraction in Caen, a city with a population of 114,000. As there is no registration, it is impossible to tell exactly how many different individuals attend, according to Dorothée Schwartz, who handles the university's administration. But the 14 seminars attract at least 1,500 people and over the course of a year the combined head count for attendance at the 122 classes reaches nearly 20,000, she said.

Like the Greek original, the idea is spreading. Emulators have set up six more Popular Universities, based on the Caen model, elsewhere in France, plus one in Belgium, one in Boston and one in Niamey, Niger.

Word of the school is spreading beyond the francophone world, as translation of Onfray's books into nearly 20 languages has brought him a wider audience. The first to be published in English came out this year in the United States as "Atheist Manifesto," and in Britain as "In Defense of Atheism."Onfray's lectures are the basis of a series of books that he is publishing in installments, under the title, "A Counter History of Philosophy." He teaches a nonidealistic tradition of philosophy that runs counter to the Platonic, Christian tradition and ranges from the Greeks Democratus, Diogenes and Epicurus up to the 18th- and 19th-century British philosophers William Godwin, a father of anarchism, and Jeremy Bentham, the advocate of utilitarianism.

This year he will cover Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the first part of his course, and the Germans Arthur Schopenhauer and Max Stirner in the second.As in the Garden of Epicurus, the classes are not merely lectures by a teacher to a passive class, but a system of intellectual exchange and exploration between like-minded people, aged from 7 to more than 77.

Gilles Geneviève gives classes of philosophy to children aged 7 and up. The Popular University, he said, "is at once an opportunity to meet children to philosophize with me - or to philosophize without me, in fact, because I try to put into place what I call a 'libertarian Socratic dialogue.' I think that it is not really necessary to have an adult in order for kids to be able to philosophize. It suffices to provide them with a space to do it in." He said the aim is to turn them into people "who have a taste for going to conferences, reading books, following courses, and conversing." Onfray's courses too are made up of one part lecture and one part discussion. Befitting a philosophy of physical sensation, he said that the courses aim to address most of the senses: art, for example, for sight, and jazz for hearing.

Other courses cover medical ethics, literature, economics and psychoanalysis.To address one of the most important senses, Onfray endowed a garden, planted with exotic vegetables, last year at the Popular University of Taste in nearby Argentan. Here, great epicures and chefs, including Jean-François Piège of the Hotel Crillon in Paris, teach a student body hungry for more than knowledge.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/15/europe/riepop.php