Introduction

Broadly speaking, my work focuses on cultivating the philosophical and artistic tendencies that show up early in human development and are required for building a solid foundation for further development. The motive force behind this work is the intuition is that by treating the intellectual and the creative faculties as equally important, distinct, and interdependent, we can scaffold for the type of learning needed for self-transformation, the type of learning needed to maintain and, possibly, strengthen the ongoing project we call “civilization.”

My formal training began in art education. My longtime preoccupation with the process of learning, rooted in the observation that all children exhibit latent genius tendencies, in this project is combined with the ancient Greek idea that we need each other to think. As Plato said, thinking is a matter of internal dialogue. When we are young, we clearly need one another to think; the social factor is ever-present and necessary. To mature intellectually involves a process of internalizing otherness, of learning to think from points-of-view not our own, or our immediate. As a regulative ideal, we strive to think by ourselves, but it is in fact surprisingly difficult. And it is not clear whether we ever truly transcend that need for one another.

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Contents

1. The Art of Philosophy:
a proposition for the fusion of philosophy and art

2. The Gift and the Game:
theorizing toward an art & philosophy program designed to cultivate critical and creative thinking

3. Attitudes of Philosophy
the underlying attitudes that make the practice of philosophy possible

4. Elementary School Remote Learning Project at the Outset of the Pandemic
education oriented around questions and student interest

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1. The Art of Philosophy

The working idea here is, first, that philosophy is something to do (as opposed to something only to read about), second, that the practice of philosophy is fundamentally creative (an art as opposed to a fixed system), and third, that the substrate of that art, rather than paper or clay, is oneself, or what Edith Cobb called our “world image.”

To some extent, we all engage in this activity of self-making and have a role in who we become, since we are all stuck making choices. We go here rather than there, feed our minds this instead of that. But in another sense, we do not make ourselves, and must learn and discover ourselves through experience, as well as discover reality in its fixed aspects. Where our lives are fixed and where they are malleable is not easy to know. Perhaps it is not ours to know. Regardless of where the line is drawn, the desire to know reality seems intrinsic to humans, at least in the beginning, as children. What is real, substantial, fixed, unmoving? What are the physical walls of reality we inevitably bump into? What about moral laws, psychological laws? Is fairness a law as real as gravity? Zak Stein, an educational philosopher, argues that it is, and that the child confronts that law, for example, on the playground when the teacher hands out three M&Ms to all but one child. If that kid gets only one M&M, the experience, observes Stein, is like hitting up against a definite wall, as hard and off-putting as a physical one. All this is to deepen the question. How are we involved in who we become? To what extent do we have a choice in who we are?

We all continuously relate to reality, but whether we relate consciously or unconsciously seems to be the crux, and health emerges from relating to reality. This was Plato’s idea in proposing that the good and the true were eternally bound. Knowing is itself good. In this way, the philosopher must befriend his own ignorance, be allured by it and seek it out—as much as knowledge. On the other hand, we can treat our own ignorance as an enemy, stop examining life, and elect to live within our perceptions, but when our perceptions no longer correspond to reality, we play a hand in creating difficulty for ourselves. The discrepancy becomes felt, a source of suffering, but we cannot locate the source, walking lost in our own matrix. This has to do with learning to accept constraint, limitation, and finitude, particularly our own, and to work with them, or in spite of them, as we are. To use an analogy from visual arts, we could say, the best way for an artist to exercise their full creativity is by understanding the conditions and limitations of their materials. If we know the limits and accept the constraints, then we’re free, as Spinoza said. We must reconcile with constraint and accept: life is involvement, and involvement is change, transformation. We must be transformed. Why? Ignorance. What else can we do?

The desire to know is an intrinsic feature of a healthy human mind, and begins in childhood. This knowing requires self-distance, dialogue, authenticity, reckoning with one’s limitations, and so on—and it is also the groundwork of philosophical practice.  While children spontaneously draw, play, and pretend in order to learn and mature, the serious play characteristic of philosophical inquiry functions in the same way, to continue the learning and maturation throughout adulthood.  My sense is that the attempt to “know” reality, globally taken up in childhood, is one of life’s essential “games” for the human, that we all live with the fruits of our attempt, and that more thoroughly exploring the nature of this Game could be useful. While the word “game” may hold negative connotations for some, I like it. I think of what “games” and “play” mean for people, as children—in their attempt at becoming people! Hide and Seek and Peek-A-Boo just emerge from us! They are strange games in that no one really teaches us them. We just know them. They’re instinctive. Games like these allow children to discover themselves, their desires, needs, and (intra-, inter-) relations. Joy is an adequate raison d’etre for anything. The idea that philosophy is grounded in joy may seem counter-intuitive, but perhaps we can make the idea ring true by comparing philosophy to a game of Hide-and-Seek. They overlap thematically in the present and the absent, the visible and the vanished, the real and the fabricated, the ritual repetition and the expectancy of something new to come, the lack of completion. I frame philosophical practice as an infinite Game, as almost the continuation of the first and principal game we began playing in childhood. This work will focus on the principles, orienting ideas, and regulating ideals for such a practice.

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The Gift and the Game

an art and philosophy program designed to cultivate thinking skills and attitudes

The Gift and the Game is an educational program that concentrates on developing two distinct modes of human cognition: first, the capacity for rigorous, critical thought, reason, and logic, and, second, the capacity for creative work, for vision.  The goals of the program are suited to all students, beneficial to all subjects and life paths, and adaptable to all ages.  Education should seek the harmonization between reason and vision. In typical public schools today, reason is identified with mathematics and the sciences, while vision is identified with the arts. This would be no problem, except in schools math and art almost never speak, and are rarely presented as operating within the same sphere. These two concepts belong together, not apart: reason without vision cultivates power without aim, while vision without reason is impractical, impotent.

An intuition here, probably first seeded by Edith Cobb’s book The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, is that the child unconsciously models a secret to unifying philosophy and art. The animating spirit of the child is simultaneously serious and playful. It could be argued that a similar spirit forms the backbone of a lot of great art and philosophy. Without playfulness, one cannot handle materials spontaneously and form original relationships with them. And philosophically, without playfulness, one cannot adopt a position and play it out, breathe life into it; foreign ideas will be held out at arm’s length, remaining foreign, and therefore unexplorable. A kind of serious play is called for. How to maintain and develop this animating spirit? Socrates offers one model for carrying this spirit into adulthood, and his dialogical thinking practice inspires this work.

The Two Modes
In recognition of the fact that the practical and the visionary, the real and the ideal, the ethical and the aesthetic, the necessary and the potential, in this world are so naturally opposed, and yet mutually strengthened if brought into the service of one another, this program aims to cultivate both the logical and the creative “minds” often associated with the left and right brain hemispheres.  This program broadly focuses on thinking skills by working on two essential modes of thought which are in dynamic interplay/tension with one another: roughly speaking, open-endedness (aka the Gift) and close-endedness (the Game).  The Gift is related to creative capacity, envisioning, imagining, dreaming, potentials.  The Game is about logic and reasoning, critical thinking, the scientific and mathematical mind, consensus life.  Logical thinking skills are cultivated using a philosophical practice, while creative thinking skills are cultivated through prompt-based creative projects and open-ended, point-of-departure style discussions.  The two extremes are then interwoven and combined.  By giving the student the experience of both, and by intentionally, systematically fusing them and putting them in contrast with one another, the program aims to give the student the perspective to be able to appreciate and assess the values and weaknesses of each.    

The Gift
The Gift encourages divergent thinking, open-endedness, the creative expression of the person.  In this mode, everyone is “right” as long as they are respectfully sharing and trying.  All opinions are equally valid.  There are no wrong answers, but instead a pluralistic ecology of perspectives, everyone with a right to their own.  This mode recognizes every individual as unique and containing some (perhaps latent) inner genius.  It honors potential.  This is a fundamental operating mode for the human, full of intuitions, impressions, feelings (“system 1” in Kahneman’s language).  It is at the core of modern public school art programs.  And why not?  The idea is that making anything is good.  The mere process of making something has obvious positive effects on its maker, regardless of how it is seen by others, if it sells, etc.  But, this mode runs the risk of over-emphasizing the subjectivity at the expense of knowing others, how one is seen by others, how one’s work affects others.  It runs the risk of entitlement.  It can dovetail into narcissism.  Nevertheless, art has incredible power and belongs in our lives.  The creative spirit is directly connected to health, sanity, meaning, life fulfillment, whether as cause or effect.  We will have art in our lives, no matter what.  So, to balance out the deficiency of the artistic temperament, where anything can be, where anything that is creatively imagined is good, the student will practice critical-thinking skills.

This work is done through making art, responding to art, literature, media, and having open conversations about interesting ideas.  One student responds to an idea or a question, then another student offers their idea, and on and on.  Little priority is placed on students responding in the moment to one another, and following an idea out together.  All ideas are on equal ground, equally valued.  This mode, the Gift, we could conceptualize as “conversational.”  The conversation goes where it goes, and the purpose of the exchange is mainly expression.  In terms of structure and values, this is distinct from the other mode, the Game, which seeks the best ideas, which identifies clearly one subject which is being discussed, and which does not allow another student to segue to a different topic without what Leibniz calls a “substantial link.”  Whereas the Gift is conversational, the Game is dialectical.

The Game
The critical, logical mind is necessary for skill development and closing the distance between the student’s current and potential skills.  Therefore, this orientation works on evaluation and what can be verified.  One must learn to judge, not as the final arbiter of truth or value, but in order to evolve, for one can only judge in one’s current capacity, with one’s current limitations, and given the constraints of the task at hand.  Here, students will practice thinking in the sense of the deliberate, voluntary linking of thought to thought.  They will become familiar with the so-called Socratic method of drawing out what is latent within themselves (note how the word “education” comes from the root “educe,” and thus education has its roots in this way, epitomized by Socrates, of discovering what is within).  And finally, they will learn to trust and use their innate sense of preference to animate their thinking. 

This work is done mainly with the whole group.  I think of it as recentering through decentering.  The facilitator/animator’s job mainly consists in continuously recentering the student’s attention by decentering the self and directing their attention on the others through reformulation, verification, staying on the same page, responding to the question asked rather than simply responding as one is compelled, etc.  Learning to direct one’s own attention must be one of the prized goals of any education, regardless of subject.  As William James wrote in his field-pioneering work, The Principles of Psychology (1890), “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will…. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”  In this case, the attention is brought to the others in order to see oneself.

Learning to appreciate difference, accept and work with conflict
A final introductory goal of this program is to help students recognize, accept, respect, and work with their own sense of conflict, inner and outer, to accept conflict and dynamic tension, as intrinsic to life, and to equip students with ideas that give them courage and the sense that they have the ability to deal with conflict.  This is practiced by learning to play with philosophical contraries, by learning to appreciate the inherent interplay, or tension, between what in philosophy are called antinomies (collective vs. singular, real vs. ideal, objective vs. subjective, creative vs. logical, unity vs. plurality, etc.).

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Attitudes of Philosophy

“…Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
—Plato, Theaetetus, 155 D

“Learning things and wondering about things, as a rule, is pleasant.  For wondering implies the desire to learn and to know.  In this the object of wonder is an object of desire…”.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982 b 17 ff

1. Befriend Your Own Ignorance

2. Suspend Judgment

3. Embrace Mystery and Confusion

4. Accept Limitation in all Truths

5. Be Thankful for Criticism

6. Brave the Demands of Reason

7. Enjoy the Constraints of Others

8. Treat the World as if it is Intelligible

9. Be Concise

10. Maintain Fellowship / Prioritize the Relationship

11. Be Empty, Be Available

12. Highlight the Other’s Truth / Speak to the Signal, Discard the Noise

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Elementary School Remote Learning Project at the Outset of the Pandemic