Reflecting on the purposes of university, this essay enquires as to the very possibility of teaching, and more than that, to the possibility of knowledge and meaning in contemporary societies, in which the conditions for the incorporation and transmission of knowledges are in disarray: an uncertainty, sometimes radical, about oneself and about the other paves the way to a profound psychic insecurity. The continual sensorial fluxes trigger a novel division of the work of the senses, highlighting the role of vision in detriment of the remaining senses, inducing a redistribution of the relations between sensation, perception and reflection, and strengthening the contingency, the instability, the uncertainty that are found at the heart of the culture and education crisis. The thinking shrinks, translated into a specialization, a compartmentalization of the knowledges. What kind of personality and of conscience, what form of sensibility is stimulated by such education? What does the word conscience mean these days? Can we still speak of critical activity? The individual, original thinking seems to have declined in the face of the corporation, of the group, of the collective legitimized by the number, the quantity, the demands for productivity and the evaluation by managers, and tends after that to become more and more homogeneous and conformist. Nevertheless, the essay seeks to show that these features, not being new, have just been accelerated and intensified by contemporaneity, and paradoxically do not deprive us of all hope as to the purposes of university and to the possibilities of critical thinking.
University; Contemporaneity; Knowledge; Conscience