That Tuesday morning in November, Mr. Larrieu had warned them: a "rather unusual" guest would come to speak about morality. The Year 13 students had imagined a tedious sociologist. No one had anticipated a barefoot man in a grey linen tunic, who walked through the door sniffing the air with suspicion.
His name was Socrates. He came from Athens. He was roughly seventy years old, and he looked at them all with the air of someone about to ask a question from which you would not emerge unscathed.
Socrates— Very well. Tell me, young people: are you free?
Léa raised her hand, annoyed by default. She had revised Kant until midnight.
Léa— Yes, obviously. We do what we want.
Socrates— Ah. And if you "wanted" to never feel hunger, could you manage it?
Silence. Someone, in the back, quietly ate a cereal bar. Socrates smiled — not kindly.
Socrates— What I am asking is whether you truly know your deeper self. Do you act according to your own will, or according to your desires, your habits, your inherited fears?
Thomas, who tended to find everything "boring", sat up straight in spite of himself. There was something in this man's voice — not the authority of a teacher, but something more unsettling: the sincere conviction that he didn't know either, and that he was genuinely searching. This was maieutics at work.
Thomas— You seem to think freedom is a matter of reason. But Nietzsche says that reason is sometimes a lie we tell ourselves.
Socrates— Interesting. Does your Nietzsche then claim that the search for truth should be abandoned? Or merely that we should be wary of comfortable truths?
Thomas opened his mouth. Closed it again. That was precisely the distinction he had missed. The bell rang. Nobody moved. Socrates stared at the ceiling with the expression of someone who has just encountered a very loud inner demon.
Socrates— Is that the signal that thought must stop?
Léa(packing up her bag) — No. It's just that we have P.E. next.
He nodded, as if he found the whole situation perfectly absurd.
— End of Episode I —
The headmaster, who had been out of his depth ever since Socrates's arrival the week before, had decided to put the next guest speakers up at the Hôtel Bellevue, on Rue de la Paix. And so it was that René Descartes and David Hume found themselves sharing Room 12, with an en-suite bathroom and a view of the car park.
Descartes had immediately settled at the small writing desk, taken out a sheet of paper, and was beginning his ritual: doubting everything. He doubted the table. He doubted the window. He doubted the car park. Hume, lying on the bed, watched him with a mixture of amusement and professional concern.
Hume— You know, you can doubt indefinitely, but it won't get you anywhere. Knowledge comes from sensory experience, not from cogitation.
Descartes— Wrong. The senses deceive us constantly. Only reason can reach certain truths. Cogito ergo sum — I think therefore I am — that is the only thing that cannot be doubted.
Hume— Really? When I search within myself for this "self" you speak of, I find nothing stable. I perceive warmth, then cold. Joy, then boredom. I never come across a fixed, permanent self — only a stream of perceptions succeeding one another. The self is perhaps nothing more than a useful fiction.
A heavy silence settled. Outside, a car horn honked in the car park that Descartes had decided not to believe in.
Descartes— Are you saying that I don't exist?
Hume— I'm saying that the "you" you believe to be stable is in constant metamorphosis. What you were at twenty, what you are now, what you will be tomorrow — these are distinct states that you retrospectively gather under the same name.
Descartes looked at his hand. It seemed stable enough. But he was beginning to have doubts — which was, technically, his favourite activity, though right now it bothered him.
Descartes— And this crisis you describe — this uncertainty about identity — how is a person supposed to live with it?
Hume— By accepting that absolute certainty is a fantasy. Life is about navigating with probabilities, habits, provisional beliefs. Empiricism isn't a lack — it's an honesty.
The following morning, in class, the two philosophers intervened together. Léa was the first to ask the question that had been burning on her lips ever since her parents' divorce, when she had felt as though she no longer knew quite who she was.
Léa— Can you change deeply — really change — and still remain the same person?
Descartes and Hume exchanged a glance. It was, perhaps, the first time they had agreed on anything: this was an excellent question.
Descartes— In my view, there is within you a thinking substance — a soul — that persists through all changes.
Hume— In my view, what "persists" is the memory and the narrative you construct about yourself. You are the author of your own inner story. To change is to rewrite — not to die.
Léa wrote down both answers in her notebook. She didn't yet know which she preferred. Perhaps both, depending on the day.
— End of Episode II —
Simone de Beauvoir arrived twenty minutes late, coffee in hand and an expression that made it clear she had opinions about practically everything. She glanced at the programme written on the board — The Great Male Figures of the Nineteenth-Century Novel — and took a deep breath.
Beauvoir— Let's start there. Why do we say "male" to describe what is simply presented as universal?
Mr. Larrieu, who had come to observe the class, sensed it was going to be a long day.
Student (Camille)— Because... they're male authors?
Beauvoir— Because culture has long been defined by and for men, and sensitivity — emotion, intuition, feeling — has been systematically associated with the feminine in order to devalue it. What was "rational" was noble. What was "sensitive" was weak. Guess who got assigned which.
Thomas raised his hand.
Thomas— But is sensitivity really a weakness? Like, objectively?
Beauvoir— No. This is what I call patriarchal devaluation: a cultural construction that presents as natural and inferior a faculty that is in fact precious. Sensitivity is a way of knowing the world — not its opposite.
Léa thought of all the times she had been told "you're too sensitive" as though it were a flaw.
Léa— So when someone is told they're "too emotional", that's... a way of controlling them?
Beauvoir— It is a way of keeping them in a subordinate position. Emancipation begins when we understand that our supposed "flaws" are sometimes qualities we have been taught to be ashamed of.
The second part of the class focused on transmission. Beauvoir wrote on the board: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Beauvoir— What I am asserting here goes beyond gender. We become what society, family, and school teach us to be. Transmission is never neutral — it carries the values, the prejudices, the silences of those who transmit.
Camille— So education is a form of manipulation?
Beauvoir— Not necessarily. But it can be, when it closes doors rather than opens them. An education that emancipates gives the individual the tools to build themselves, including the ability to challenge what they have been taught. An education that alienates teaches them to stay silent.
Thomas jotted something in his notebook. Léa saw him write: "Telling someone they're 'too sensitive' = asking them to make themselves smaller." She decided he wasn't quite as annoying as she'd thought.
— End of Episode III —
The Year 13 class was visiting the photo exhibition set up in the school's entrance hall — a selection of "landmark images of the twentieth century" chosen by the library. Walter Benjamin, short, round glasses, worn briefcase, joined them in front of a reproduction of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.
Benjamin— Look at how history is told. Who decided this image was "landmark"? Who was excluded from the selection?
Thomas— It's a school exhibition, you know, it's not the Louvre.
Benjamin— Exactly my point. Even a school exhibition is a political act. History is always written by the victors. The defeated, the oppressed, the anonymous — they are there, in the margins of official photographs, if one is willing to look.
Léa stopped in front of a protest photograph from the 1960s. She had never paid attention to the faces in the background.
Léa— So "official" history erases people?
Benjamin— It renders them invisible. That is a form of symbolic violence. The true task of the historian — and the artist — is to brush history against the grain: to seek out what has been erased, to give voice to what has been silenced.
They stopped next in front of a reproduction of a Cubist painting by Picasso. A student in the class — Inès, who wanted to go to art school — frowned.
Inès— I don't understand why this is called "revolutionary". It's just... strange.
Benjamin— It is precisely because it is "strange" that it is revolutionary. An artistic revolution occurs when a work breaks so completely with the conventions of its time that it makes those conventions visible as conventions. Before Picasso, nobody "saw" linear perspective — it was invisible because it seemed natural. He shattered it, and suddenly we understood that it had been a choice, a construction.
Inès— So breaking with tradition is also a way of revealing it?
Benjamin— Exactly. Art lives in this tension between continuity and rupture. Every work inherits from a past and transforms it — sometimes gently, sometimes violently. This is what I call the loss of aura in the age of reproduction: when an image can be copied infinitely, its relationship to tradition changes radically.
Inès took out her phone and photographed the reproduction of the Picasso. Benjamin watched her with an unreadable expression — somewhere between sadness and irony.
Benjamin— There. You've just done exactly what I'm talking about.
Inès— Is that good or bad?
Benjamin— It is our age.
— End of Episode IV —
The open day had been a bad idea from the start. Someone — nobody knew exactly who — had invited Michel Foucault and Ludwig Wittgenstein to co-facilitate a workshop entitled "What is the human?" in the biology lab, between the plastic skeletons and the posters about mitosis. The two philosophers had shaken hands at the door with the tense politeness of two people who have read each other's work and have opinions.
Wittgenstein had immediately sat on the edge of a lab bench and was staring at the ceiling with alarming intensity. Foucault had found a blank whiteboard and was already holding a marker like a weapon.
Foucault— Let us start with the question itself. When we ask "what is the human?", we assume there is a stable answer. But the human as a universal and eternal figure is a recent invention — and perhaps a temporary one.
Wittgenstein(without taking his eyes off the ceiling) — The problem with your formulation is that it presupposes we know what "human" means long enough to announce its disappearance. The limits of my language are the limits of my world. Perhaps the question itself is badly posed.
Léa, in the front row, wrote down the first two sentences in her notebook with the energy of someone who has just realised that the exams are in three months.
Thomas— So... you disagree about whether the question even makes sense?
Foucault— What interests me is how power and knowledge construct the definition of what counts as a "normal" human. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century did not only produce knowledge — it produced epistemes: invisible frameworks that determine what it is possible to think.
Wittgenstein— And I would say that many of these "philosophical problems" are illusions created by the confused use of language. When words leave their natural context, they begin to spin in the void — like an engine in neutral.
The room was beginning to heat up. Outside, a group of parents was touring the school, completely unaware that an epistemological revolution was taking place between two chemistry benches.
Foucault— But language itself is a power relation, Ludwig. What can be said, what cannot be said, who has the right to speak about what — these are structures of control.
Wittgenstein turned towards him for the first time since the beginning of the workshop. There was something unusual in that gaze — not irritation, but attention.
Wittgenstein— You are not entirely wrong. Ordinary language is not innocent. But the solution is not to deconstruct it indefinitely. It is to look at how it actually functions, in practice, in life.
A silence. Foucault put down the marker. This was, objectively, a minor concession — but coming from him, it was almost a sonnet.
Foucault— I... agree with that.
Léa and Thomas exchanged a glance. Something had just happened, though they couldn't quite have said what.
After the workshop, they found themselves in the empty corridor, waiting for the lift that had been broken since October. Foucault was studying the health awareness posters with a professional expression. Wittgenstein was watching Foucault.
Wittgenstein— You know, I've read your work on the limits of the human. I disagreed with almost all of it. But the way you pose the questions...
Foucault— The way I pose questions is often better than my answers. I know that.
Wittgenstein— That may be why it interests me.
The lift did not come. They took the stairs together, continuing to argue — but more quietly, and with that particular quality of arguments in which both people pretend not to notice that they want the other to keep talking.
Downstairs, Léa passed them. She was going to ask a question about the syllabus. She changed her mind.
Léa(to Thomas, in a low voice) — Did you see how they look at each other?
Thomas— Like two people who've just realised the other one actually exists.
Léa— What's the philosophical concept for that?
Thomas— I think it's called meeting someone.
— End of Episode V —
(to be continued, perhaps, if the lift ever gets fixed)