I am interested in bringing philosophy into teaching, and believe it plays an important role in all educational activities. There is a field called “philosophy of education,” but this is primarily interested in generating philosophical questions about education. In philosophy of education classes, students philosophise about educational issues. This tends to place emphasis on the role philosophy can play in conceiving (and practicing) pedagogy.
But outside of philosophy of education, students can profit from philosophising topics of any course. Philosophical issues are implicit, explicit or nascent in particular topics within a subject, but are also present in the relationship between subjects, and in the relationship between what is taught and how it is taught (ie curriculum and pedagogy). To bring philosophising into education in this way connects with certain philosophical premises about the purposes and nature of education. For example, philosophising tends to leave students with more questions than answers, and against a view which sees education as the commitment to replace ‘ignorance’ with ‘knowledge.’ Because my main interests are ecological education and biology education, I am always finding philosophical questions to bring out in these areas. While I think there is a place for ‘understanding’ ecological and biological phenomena, I think the artistry of education involves navigating an ongoing situation which involves making and breaking questions and answers. When to linger on one or the other, or to rupture them, is the process I aspire to improve in my pedagogy.
I think academic philosophy is becoming increasingly unphilosophical, so my bringing philosophy into education is not an attempt to get people acting like professional philosophers. My main concern with professional philosophy is that the ‘philosophical experience’ is very often absent or buried, because of the tendency to focus on quality and validity of method, which for philosophers is mainly the development of arguments. The focus on developing better arguments may have its own pedagogical value, but on its own I consider this to be the field of logic, not philosophy. I suggest that bad philosophical positions can be investigated and defended with highly rigorous arguments, while important philosophical positions can be developed through poor ones. While an important philosophical position argued well is perhaps the best outcome, given the choice between the two options in the previous sentence, I would often opt for the good philosophical idea over the good argument. The fact that Plato continues to be read, even though first year undergraduates can rather easily punch holes in his arguments, suggests that this intuition is still held by others, and that despite appearances the philosophical spirit has not yet been destroyed by logicians. His ideas are defended with new arguments, or tweaked and then supported, suggesting method is subservient to vision. Why else do some ideas get resuscitated perpetually, while others are left to fall away?
A master logician might see errors in arguments so quickly that they prevent themselves from ‘experiencing’ the idea being argued for. Also note that a computer could in principle identify errors and develop logical arguments extremely effectively, but is unlikely to be considered a philosophical machine. Perhaps pedagogically, an argument sometimes only needs to be as good as is necessary for a student to take the idea seriously, and imagine what the world is like through that lens. Perhaps it only needs to be good enough for a student to care enough to enter into that world, explore it, and spontaneously develop their own reasons, consequences and connections, –but also feelings– within it. To ‘experience’ the world philosophically.
I used the word ‘philosophical experience’ and ‘philosophical question,’ and claim that these are importance, not only for retaining the philosophical spirit, but also pedagogically. What what is a philosophical question, and what is it like to experience such questions?
A philosophical experience can be characterised in several ways. Here are two preliminary intuitions:
1) A philosophical experience occurs when something one unreflectively assumes, and which forms the basis of daily life, is suddenly the focus of consciousness and our assumed attitude cast in doubt. Such an experience renders to that thing a sense that it is both better known and less well known than it was previously. It appears as ‘better known’ in the sense that our previously unreflected-upon engagement with that idea now appears somewhat dreamlike and superficial. But for this same reason the thing also appears less well known, and mysterious. Such experience is similar to how a word appears odd when we dissociate it from its use by saying it many times. As such, a philosophical experience needs no argument at all. It can even be experienced without words, as gestalt switch, an insight, a possibility, a doubt or a contradiction.
2) Often a kind of jamais-vue, philosophical experience is inherently an emotional experience. It can be exciting, terrifying, lonely, eery, beautiful, confusing, loving, or a combination of all. There is something uncanny and disruptive about philosophical experiences. They are discoordinating and disorienting because such experiences open and then sustain questions which shake basic foundational assumptions we rely on in our lives, and put at risk any sense of firm footing in the world. A philosophical experience feels like an adventure. It can feel dangerous, and people may not be equally open to it, or need different kinds of scaffolding or preparation for it.
One reason philosophical experience / questions is backgrounded in courses (including philosophy courses) is because it seems more difficult to standardise a way of evaluating its quality. I believe I can sense when someone is experiencing a philosophical problem, but it is harder to pinpoint on rubric sheets just what a marker would be looking for compared with, say, the validity of the argument. This leads to another version of Biesta’s (2009) observation that in assessment, we tend to value what we can measure rather than measuring what we value. (We could call this ‘the assessment fallacy’, recognising its resonance with Dewey’s ‘philosophical fallacy’). Another reason it is backgrounded is because students and teachers may have unquestioned assumptions about the purpose of education at odds with cultivating philosophical experiences.
Of course, the development of arguments and the development of ideas cannot be as easily parsed as is suggested here. The act of working out an argument is sometimes a clarification of its consequences, scope, conditions, and connections with other ideas, and so developing arguments can itself be the act of dwelling in a philosophical experience. But even here, I am not so sure the quality of the argument always matters. Sometimes, the arguments provide qualitative depth and texture to the philosophical idea. Other times, I feel it is the time spent reading or thinking up the arguments that sustains the philosophical experience, and that the minimal condition is that such arguments are simply ‘believable enough’ to hold this imaginative space. In any case, argument is subservient to the ideas it develops.
The assumption that it would be otherwise is grounded in the premise that our beliefs are founded and develop primarily through reason, evidence and justification. But we often have a feeling that something is plausible or true, and then work out why we think this is the case. If the philosophical experience is important in education, then the cultivation of plausible possibilities becomes paramount. In addition to reasoning, this requires an engagement with the full dimension of what underlies a person’s openness to novel ideas. This means philosophising education has psychological dimensions too, a rhetorical aspect including context setting, mood, responsiveness, narrative, silence, and much else besides.
For a continuation, click here.