“France is a country that thinks,” [Lagarde] 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.”
Perhaps too confondu at how Lagarde managed to come up with her new idea, French thinker Alain Finkielkraut responded rather thoughtfully:
“How absurd to say we should think less! If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”
I would've taken the opposite rhetorical approach: Instead of saying that thinking is work, how does Lagarde deal with the fact that work, largely, is thinking. Being a legal scholar in high repute, JPS doesn't have to roll up his sleeves to go to work. In fact, the air conditioning in his building is such that, if his sleeves were rolled up, he might be distracted from analyzing promissory estoppel by the fact that his arms are cold.
If Lagarde's advocating the abolition of France's 35 hour work week tradition, hey, at least that's something substantive to debate. How that relates to not thinking, especially for those in thinking professions, I'm not so sure.
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