I don’t think it is arbitrary that philosophy comes back, again and again to certain kinds of concepts. As I posted earlier, a philosophical experience can be seen as the disorienting severance from structures of meaning and action that we unreflectively partake in. But not all concepts are equal. The disruption of our unreflected upon use of certain implicit premises is more disorienting than others. Some such structures are relatively ‘higher up’, meaning less is disruptive when called into question. But other notions hold mountains above them, so when they are challenged, the level of possible disorientation that ensues is much more profound.
This is one reason why philosophy returns to questions of ontology, epistemology and ethics, ie to being, knowing, and doing. All trace back to basic categorical orientations of how we conceive and participate in the world, and which underlie language. Questioning ‘being’ is asking things about the nature of what we call nouns, questioning ‘doing’ asks about the nature of what we call verbs. Such questions operate at a fundamental level because they engage the different basic categorical ways in which we encounter ourselves and the world. “Basic categorical ways” means that, while particular nouns and verbs may be disrupted (and disruptive), by disrupting noun and verb themselves, we also disrupts all of the terms within them. ‘Knowing’ is a bit different. It is not represented in any basic grammatical category. However, it is also basic and underlies language because the utterance of any sentence implies an unquestioned cognisance of some sort. To say anything indicates an epistemological attitude towards what has been expressed, that we believe it, think it is true, for example. For example, the sentence “I am not sure” implies some certainty that I am not sure, an epistemological attitude underlying its formation and independent of its particular claim. (There is no getting around this. As soon as I say “I am not sure even if I am not sure” it is then that claim which holds some authority). The basic point is that something like knowing is unreflectively present and widespread, just as are things like doing and being.
The particular philosophical attitude that each of these fundamental and pervasive aspects call upon in us is itself a reflection of the differences between them in daily experience. For example, doing is an activity, and when “I” am doing something, there is a feeling that I am involved in the world, can direct myself, and that my doing has effects. It is because the unreflected subjective experience of doing has these dimensions that it generates ethical questions. Doing in non-subjective experiences may lack certain of these feelings, and attenuate others. For example, a rock falling off a cliff may not seem directed, and its effects are instead foregrounded. So doing in some circumstances can also lead to philosophical disorientation about the nature of causality. Both in turn are very different from the kinds of questions that arise when we think what it means for something to ‘be’. The particular philosophical experiences that arise from questioning what ‘noun’ is, in turn depends on what entity we are considering ‘to be’. Again, for example, whether that entity is a subject or not leads to different philosophical experiences with different attitudes for exploration. The reader will detect an obvious side effect. Philosophical experiences foregrounds how words such as being and doing, seem to have coherent and pragmatically understood meanings in unreflected upon daily life, but actually harbour very different and conflicting phenomena under their umbrella. This realisation is itself disorienting, itself a philosophical experience.
Aesthetics is another big basic area in philosophy, and it is probably not far off to suggest that it has something to do with exploring what it means to live in a world where there are qualities in phenomena, which we call adjectives and adverbs.
There are other perennial philosophical topics, such as what is: thinking, mind, time, consciousness, understanding, truth, explanation, goodness, purpose, nature, and so on. Time (and space) are interesting in a similar way to knowing. Rather than being an instance of a basic grammatical category, or an aspect that arises through questioning such categories, time and space also appear as underlying the possibility of utterance in the first place. Kant called them forms of intuition, and distinguishes them from categories. (He also thought that time was connected to the kind of knowing that broadly underlies awareness and language, above, in the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’). The kind of philosophy that engages time and space is thus expected to have a style different from the rest in this list. The others terms seem to develop from distinctions, approaches, and questions that arise within the base categories. For example, although understanding is different from knowing, it can be thought of as a distinction within epistemology. (Obviously, I am not using the word category in the same way as Kant’s first critique, which consisted of discriminations of categories within knowing. It is closer to the kind of categorisation that led Kant to separate books on epistemology, ethics and aesthetics.)
As far as educational implications, I am not going to suggest some simplistic scaffolding story. It cannot be the case that those uncomfortable with the disorienting feeling of philosophical experiences can slowly be inducted into it in a straightfoward way, such as starting with what I have called ‘higher level’ experiences and moving gradually towards the bottomless depths. Whether or not a disorientation is uncomfortable and avoided is much more personal than that. Some people may be comfortable with the abstract musings of reconstructing basic premises because doing so is ‘armchair’ enough to not have significance in their ‘real worlds’. Or the other way around. Some topics (such as death, which is a philosophical atomic bomb) are philosophical experiences (related perhaps to time and nouns and other things) that can hit harder even if they are at a higher level. The important idea is that it is crucial for educators to at least be aware of the layeredness of philosophical experiences, and to explore and experiment with individual students to see what trajectory towards more profound philosophical experiences is possible.
There is also implications for learning for sustainability, but here I will list just one. If it is the case that most of our unreflected upon behaviour is also destructive, then philosophy can play a role in calling such patterns into question. We might even say that philosophy can disrupt disruptive habits, relationships, and ways of understanding, and in so doing, make space for alternative ways of recoordinating with ourselves, people and the planet. In this way, among others, philosophising education plays a role in the broader project of ecologising education.