Rethinking Philosophy for Children

Front matter

ia

Tyson E. Lewis Igor Jasinski

RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY . FOR CHILDREN os Agamben and

Contents

Preface vi Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Philosophy for Infancy 1 1 Demand 21 2 Rules 45 3 Adventure 61 4 Love 77 5 Happiness 97 6 Anarchy 117 Notes 137 References 149

Index 155

Preface

Why write a book that attempts to return to the origins of the practice known as Philosophy for/with Children (P4C) using a philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, whose ideas many consider inaccessible, impractical, and obscure? Why write a book that P4C practitioners and other educators are likely to find too abstract and not helpful (irrelevant?) to their practice, that academic philosophers will dismiss as being a form of applied philosophy (and, thus, not to be taken seriously), and that philosophers of education will regard as too theoretical and not enough focused on educational practice or policy (or at least not on a practice that matters in mainstream education)? In short, why write a book that is likely to displease almost all audiences that might want to read such a book in the first place?

Our answer is simple: love. We fell in love with the experience of a certain way of doing philosophy with children, loving this experience for whatever it is (letting it be whatever it is), feeling a passion to articulate our experience and why it is something that we want others—students and educators alike— to experience as well and why it is worth doing so in an educational setting (such as a school). What the practice consists of and the reasons we fell in love with it are, simply stated, that it allows students to come in contact with their potentiality for speaking and the demand this potentiality places upon them. Although this was self-evident to us, we did not find adequate resources in the existing P4C literature to articulate what was so singular and special about our experience. We found a lot of discussion about evaluating students’ speech for signs of reasonableness, discussions of developing certain dispositions toward citizenship and democracy, and a pragmatic appreciation for the power of critical thinking. As desirable as these ends appear to be, it was P4C’s unique ability to suspend ends (reasonableness, democracy) in order to turn attention to means that captured our imagination. It was the means as such that we began to fall in love with, the ability to speak and think full stop. And it was for this reason that an articulation with Agamben seemed necessary, as Agamben’s philosophical interests rest on understanding means without ends.

Let’s consider a conversation of a group of sixth graders, discussing the question: “What is time?”

Preface vii

“Without time there would still be time but we couldnt measure anything”

“Without time we would all be frozen. Time is not a real thing. It's not mental. Bugs are not frozen in time. They move, they have a life, and they can sense time.” “Bugs have a sense of time because they have a sleep-wake cycle. Maybe time can go in reverse?”

“Without time we would still be living. We wouldn't be frozen. We would be moving but we would have no motivation or purpose. You could show up to school once a month”

“We would still be moving, but things would just be more disorganized. We would still have a sense of time because we know when its light/dark, night/day.” “Someone said that people survived before there was time, but there is never ‘before time: There is a time before we started counting time, but there was still time.” “We are not talking about time itself. To find out what time is, we have to find out how it would be without it. Also: before time was created the universe wasn't created?

“Before we were created there was time, but it had no meaning”

“Time is just the way we look at things?

“Without time everything would go out of whack and fall into chaos?

We may wonder: Where is this going? What are the students learning? What are the ends to which they are directed (or should be directed)? As teachers, we might question at what point we need to intervene to make sure that they get better at this kind of dialogue, become more logical or reasonable, and learn to make better arguments. As researchers, we might ask what kind of data this dialogue provides and how it might be coded to uncover the efficacy of this particular pedagogical approach to critical thinking and argumentation? Yet our point is more basic: there is something about letting students speak, about abandoning them to their capacities for speech, about enabling them to adventure with saying what can be thought and think what can be said. And there is nothing we—as teachers or facilitators—could say that would add to their experience and might, in fact, diminish or even destroy it. In this sense, we merely want to share this moment of sharing with you, without analysis or interpretation, without turning speech into data or evidence (of growth, development, or progress in a certain direction). We want to share the excitement of the moment, not evaluate it.

At stake here is preserving a space and time in education for infancy—for the experience of language as a means (speakability, communicability) and how this, in the end, proves to be the foundational philosophical experience. As paradoxical as it might sound, to make sure philosophy for children remains philosophical, viii Preface we have to safeguard it as an impractical practice for preserving means over and above all ends. We have to embrace its most infantile manifestations. And this is what the literature in the field of P4C seems to continually miss—always orienting infancy toward something deemed relevant, necessary, or preferable (according to a certain standard of reasonableness or democratic participation).

We wrote this book to articulate how the kind of experience made possible by an unguided form of philosophical inquiry (letting students speak) is (has been for us)—first and foremost—a source of happiness. As such, it allowed us to glimpse the potential of education not as just a means toward the realization of a happy life, but as the place and time wherein happiness can and does suddenly make a guest appearance, transforming learning into a moment of studious play. While the following text might seem like a critique P4C, it is not. Rather, it is a return to origins in order to redeem what is most exciting, joyous, and adventurous when adults and children attend to the unique demand placed upon them by their shared infancy.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge all of our students who have experimented with various iterations of P4C and P4I with us over the years. We would also like to acknowledge our editor, Dr. Anne Keefe, for providing critical feedback on both the form and content of the book.

Today we live in a “learning society.’ Within a flexible, knowledge-driven, neoliberal economy, laborers must become “life-long learners” constantly optimizing their labor through reskilling, and likewise, learners have to orient themselves toward twenty-first-century skills needed by the neoliberal economy. Thus, the dominance of discourses and practices of learning dovetails with certain economic needs to the point where learning and laboring become largely indistinct (or at least mutually reinforcing). Likewise, Gert Biesta argues that the learning prevalent today transforms educational relations into economic transactions in which “the teacher, the educator, or the educational institution is seen as the provider, that is, the one who is there to meet the needs of the learner, and where education itself becomes a commodity—a ‘thing’—to be provided or delivered by the teacher or educational institution and to be consumed by the learner?” On both accounts, learning is not simply naturally given but is a historically specific manifestation of education according to certain economic logics. Whether one is referring to authentic learning, deep learning, situated learning, or standardized learning, there is a consistent economy of forces at play: (a) there is an intention to learn that (b) informs the selection and planning of experiences through which (c) growth, development, or progress is measured. This learning process is verified by assessment, both formal and informal.’ The economy of learning means that learning is a form of educational life that can be managed and, by extension, made increasingly operative. Just as capitalism has an uncanny ability to absorb back into itself all forms of resistance, so too do learning discourses and practices have a similar power to take all notions of education that fall outside its economy and appropriate them, instrumentalize them, and orient them toward measurable outcomes. While there is nothing about learning that is, in itself, harmful, when learning becomes a hegemonic force wedded to neoliberal economic logics it becomes increasingly dangerous, absorbing alternatives into itself, and thus erasing forms of educational life that do not abide by measurement.

One such practice that is now increasingly under threat is Philosophy for Children (P4C). While proponents of this practice might argue that P4C is under threat from the outside, we would argue that it is also under threat from the inside, meaning that to adapt to the learning society, it too has become part of a larger learning apparatus. Developed by Matthew Lipman in the 1970s, the founding assumption of P4C was to introduce philosophy into schools as a practice that lets children do philosophy through group dialogue, allowing them to become active thinkers by developing critical and reasoning skills that become the foundation for democratic development and civic engagement.* According to Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Frederick S. Oscanyan, the P4C facilitator aids in the development of such skills and dispositions by promoting a certain kind of talking—philosophical dialogue—that consists of eliciting opinions, asking for clarifications, calling for interpretation, seeking consistency when needed, requiring definitions, pinpointing assumptions, indicating fallacies, asking students to say how they know, examining alternatives, grouping ideas, and suggesting possible alternatives. Through collective philosophical dialogue concerning issues such as right and wrong, truth and falsehood, rules and standards, beauty and ugliness, and so forth, children develop logical and ethical thinking as the internalization of dialogic procedures. The facilitator should not spoon-feed children answers but help them ask and explore their own questions while steering them toward skill development and a desire to engage in further democratic dialogue: “Students are expected to be thoughtful and reflective, and increasingly reasonable and judicious” Overall, there is an emphasis on the goal (reasonableness), on something that is being sought (quaerere = to ask, gain, seek, related to “quest”), on moving forward, on advancing (the conversation), on looking for something through reasonable reflection.

“[T]he community of inquiry,’ Lipman writes, “is not aimless. It is a process that aims at producing a product—at some kind of settlement or judgment, however partial and tentative this may be?‘ Although Lipman and Sharp emphasize a holistic notion of a “well-tempered life?” Sharp makes it clear that the “ultimate criterion” that guides action—and the actions within the community of inquiry, in particular— ought to be “reasonableness”! Sharp then draws on Pierce to articulate the following formulation of the work of P4C in relation to self-transformation through reasonableness: “[T]he self is an evolving construction that is (a) oriented towards the future, (b) a developmental teleology, a pursuit of purposes or plans in which genuinely novel directions can and do emerge. And (c) during any moment of life, the self is first and foremost understood in the process of self-correction in which some species of meaning is evolving”? Notions of reasonableness and the well-tempered life have been expanded over the years to include critical, creative, and caring thinking,” but the key point here is that the content of what it means to live such a life is determined in advance of any given P4C session. The ensuing dialogue is therefore organized around a particular goal or end toward which progress, development, or growth can be assessed. In this sense, P4C is an opportunity to learn about the well-tempered life through a particular experience of reasonable speech in the presence of others.

There have been a number of critiques addressing the instrumental nature of this more or less “traditional” view of P4C and its connections to the logic of the learning society." Biesta, for example, writes that philosophy in P4C is “deployed as an instrument that is supposed to work upon individuals so that they can develop and/or acquire certain qualities, capacities and skills??? As an alternative, Biesta proposes to use “exposure” as a central educational concept. “Exposure,” he writes, “is ... not about the revelation of a unique, pre-existing identity; ... Exposure does not produce; exposure interrupts, ... bringing about an experience of not knowing?” Drawing on Foucault's theory of truth telling, Nancy Vansieleghem advocates a reconceptualization of the P4C facilitator as a parrhesiast who “does not understand speaking, thinking or seeing as skills one has to acquire—say, through ‘learning by doing’—but as a work upon the self ... in this sense the parrhesiast does not coordinate a discursive scene or focus an argument” but rather puts the self at risk. The facilitator thus cannot take an external or meta-position with reference to laws of logic or reasonableness outside of the present educational situation. And Thomas Storme and Joris Vlieghe observe: “Of course it seems convenient, if not practically inevitable, to define philosophy (for/with) children as a set of practices, competences, methods, and skills that have a specific content and deliver specific goals.” Yet, this also renders it “subservient to the existing regime, i.e. as [merely] an interesting addition to the set of competences provided by the existing curriculum”™ At stake in such critiques is a desire to separate P4C from the logic of learning, which is oriented toward the production and evaluation of learning outputs/products in the name of progress, growth, or development toward predefined goals or ends that exist outside the community of inquiry.

On the other hand, some argue that the only way to make a place for P4C in today’s strict, standardized classroom is to empirically quantify its efficacy in promoting reasoning/argumentation skills.’ From this vantage point, philosophy must be made more instrumental and more functional in order to survive as a practice within the learning society. Through measurement, the efficacy of P4C dialogue can be objectively evaluated in terms of learning outputs. Yet we argue that this interpretation of P4C is precisely what must be avoided in order to safeguard what is truly experimental and philosophical in P4C dialogue. Focusing primarily on the improvement of argumentation and reasoning skills as the main benefit (the active ingredients) of PAC, it is only consistent that Alena Reznitskaya et al. would de-emphasize the philosophical dimension in P4C by referring to P4C as “an educational environment called philosophy for children?” To simply transform P4C into another educational environment is to prematurely abandon what we see as the radical core of the practice itself and capitulate to the necessities for measurable and maximally operable outcomes that fuel the economy of the learning society.

What we want to offer in this book is a reevaluation of the potentiality of PAC. Instead of simply negating the traditional view of P4C (as critics and/or proponents of the learnification of P4C are apt to do), what we want to do is return to certain primary texts (predominantly those written by Lipman and Sharp) in order to redeem what remains latent within them, on the margins, and in the fringes. In this sense, we are adopting the philosophical methodology of Giorgio Agamben who argues that the role of philosophy is always to return to the untapped potentiality of a concept, action, event, or theory. To redeem such potentiality means that standard/normative understandings and applications should be temporarily rendered inoperative so that new, unforeseen alternative ideas and uses can come to the foreground. In this case, what we propose, a la Agamben, is a messianic reading of P4C where the messianic is not an overturning of the old for the new but rather the “world itself, with a slight adjustment, a meager difference”! This meager difference will, we argue, make all the difference in defining what is at stake when children speak. Rather than see what becomes of P4C “post-Lipman”® we want to stay with Lipman for a moment longer. The result will not produce something new—some radically new and drastically different alternative or set of helpful tips or updated curricular suggestions. Instead, the meager difference sought after will provide the reader with insight into certain marginal possibilities for thinking about what is philosophical in P4C that is threatened by the rise in learning discourses and practices (both from without and from within). The resulting portrait of P4C will be both familiar and strange, different and the same, or just different enough to continue to use the “philosophical” means in P4C.

The turn to Agamben as an ally in this adventure is not unprecedented within the P4C literature. There is passing reference to Agamben in the work of Walter Omar Kohan, for instance.” But what we want to offer here is a more systematic approach that not only references certain ideas cribbed from

Agamben’s work, but also attempts to deploy his method of doing philosophy. While it is difficult to summarize Agamben’s method, there are largely three interconnected dimensions of his method that we will use in order to think PAC differently. First, there is the structural dimension. Agamben likes to think of philosophy in magnetic terms. On every magnet, there are positive and negative poles and in between there is a zone of indistinction, inoperativity, suspension, or neutralization. This is the neutral point on a magnet that is neither positive nor negative yet somehow contains within itself both pairs of opposites simultaneously. For Agamben, this is the point of potentiality. Our question will always be to find this neutralization point in the discourses and practices surrounding P4C in order to return the theory and practice back to its philosophical origin (which has been put in jeopardy by accommodating the learning society). There is also a temporal or messianic dimension to his method. Agamben will frequently make the claim that we, as a civilization, have lost something (our gestures, our ability to celebrate, our relationship to the world, or, most importantly, our relationship with language as meaningful). But we cannot simply return to the past. Instead, Agamben argues that we have to redeem that in the past that never was—the latent potentiality in the past. It is our intuition that a close read of Lipman and Sharp—as representatives of the first wave of P4C theorists and practitioners—will enable us to discover this latent potentiality and to reclaim it for the present. As suggested above, this will not necessitate drastic, revolutionary moves, but rather slight adjustments that nevertheless will change everything. And finally, there is an educational dimension to Agamben’s work that is worth pointing out. He often pinpoints a structure of capture that separates, divides, or negates something and then attempts to render inoperative this mechanism of capture. Rendering inoperative a mechanism of capture returns us to that which we were separated from, and in doing so, opens what remains up for contemplation or study. This gesture of study has been an entry point for articulating Agamben with education,” and, in this book, we will argue that it enables us to find points of connection and separation with PC4.

P4C is worth redeeming precisely because it sees children as capable of philosophical dialogue and even philosophical creativity.” On the one hand, this is a radical gesture that interrupts a consistent bias in education: that young children cannot be philosophers, cannot think reasonably.” Emphasis on speech as a tool for developing reasonableness prematurely forecloses on a more basic and fundamental experiment, or what Agamben refers to as an

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“experimentum linguae an experiment that concerns the very existence of speech itself. P4C accepts the existence of speech as the taken-for-granted background out of which a community of inquiry can come to define itself, its goals, and its procedures. Yet for Agamben, the real philosophical experience is first and foremost the surprise at the appearance of speech as such, full stop. As Agamben states, “The only content of the experimentum is that there is language”™ This might seem rather obvious, but for Agamben, it is a radical achievement for two reasons.

First, Agamben pinpoints a central problem in Western metaphysics: an emphasis on binary negation. Examples of a critical engagement with binary logic are found throughout Agamben’s work. For instance, in linguistics, we have the separation between phone (animal voice) and logos (human language); in discourse we have a separation between philosophy (which does not possess its object but knows it) and poetry (which possess its object without knowing it); in politics we have a separation between bare life (zoe) and the life of the citizen (bios); and in biology we have the separation between the human and the animal. In each case, identity of one side of a binary pair is predicated on the negation of the other side. The danger here is that negation involves sacrifice. For instance, to be constituted as human, signs of the nonhuman animal must be negated and externalized (even if this is an impossible gesture). Agamben’s experiment in language attempts to find a starting point for thought that is purely affirmative rather than negative. This is an experiment in impossible syntheses or points of indistinction that trouble any attempt to determine and fix binary oppositions. Returning to the image of the magnet, to experiment, for Agamben, is to neutralize in order to repotentialize.

Second, for language to function as a tool of communication, it must presuppose a foundation that it can never speak. Language cannot seem to speak itself or speak its own speakability. Thus, what is actually outside of language is nothing other than its own potentiality to be spoken! An experiment in language, for Agamben, would thus have to be an experiment that does not negate such potentiality but rather figures out a way for this potentiality to pass into the act of speech without erasing itself.

Infancy is an experiment in language that attempts to overcome the impasse of Western metaphysics by returning language to its origins. Infancy is not the experience of speaking some content so much as the experience of the ability to speak. Infancy thus concerns the experience of the very limit of language—its speakability—without presupposing that this speakability is something beyond language (or inaccessible to language). To experiment with language means that the content of speech is precisely the potentiality of speech to be spoken. Whereas such potentiality is often assumed in order to be consumed in the act of speech as a sacrifice, what Agamben is after is a form of speech that is infantile insofar as it embodies or exemplifies its own possibility by continually deactivating or rendering inoperative the binary that attempts to institute a separation over and against potentiality.

Here we must define potentiality. To be in potential means that something can and cannot come into being, that it is equal parts impotentiality and potentiality. Drawing on but also moving beyond Aristotle’s original description of potentiality, Agamben writes, “Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality” in such a way that “sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness?” Instead of attempting to exhaust potentiality by having it pass without remainder into an actualization, Agamben is attempting to think a mode of being that is in potential without sacrificing impotentiality. Thus, Agamben’s question is, how can one preserve impotentiality without it being negated by an act? Paradoxically, Agamben summarizes this as follows: “What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such?” Whereas traditional philosophy presupposes impotentiality as that dimension of potentiality that must be sacrificed in the name of the act, Agamben searches for phenomena that do not exhaust potentiality but rather allow impotentiality to pass wholly into an actualization. Paradoxically, this means Agamben is interested in acts that deactualized themselves or deactualized actualizations. Such an act would not be based on negation (of impotentiality) nor would it be an act oriented toward completing or fulfilling a telos.

Examples of impotentiality passing into an actare varied throughout Agamben’s work and include the following. First, certain artists express their impotentiality in an act insofar as they are incapable of not performing/making/doing. When a musician plays an instrument with passion, he/she cannot not play. Thus, the musician gives him- or herself over to the playing, letting impotentiality (the ability to not not-play) pass into the act without negating it. Second, “preferring not to” do x, y, or z expresses impotentiality through a deactivated or neutralized gesture that does not reach its goal or fulfill its purported destiny. Think here of Bartleby the Scrivener who “would prefer not to” complete his job as a copyist, but in so doing he does not pass beyond the occupation of copyist, instead he becomes a copyist as not a copyist. In other words, he is not a copyist who fulfills the function of a copyist in terms of outputs or quotas and yet prefers not to abandon or negate his position in the firm as a copyist. Thus, he is an employee that is no longer defined in terms of work done or what is accomplished. There is a hollowing out of the content of being a copyist to the point where the role serves no function within an economy yet remains somehow in use through Bartleby’s enigmatic gestures. Third, studying, for Agamben, offers a moment of stupification in which the studier experiences his/her capability to think confronting itself. Study is the contemplation of potentiality (in general) and infancy (in particular). This is a thought whose content is its own possibility or whose possibility passes into the form of content without separation or sacrifice of that which remains impotential within thought. All of these forms critically undermine binaries between activity and passivity (cannot not do/be/ make), potentiality and actuality (preferring not), capability and incapability (contemplation), and in the process suggest a form-of-life that does not negate impotentiality but rather allows impotentiality to express itself through various forms of suspension and inoperativity.

For us, philosophy with and for children offers another experience of such impotentiality: infancy. Infancy is an experience of one’s potentiality to speak passing into speech without negation and without destiny. Instead of negating its origin in order to communicate this or that message or skill or developmental telos, speech only communicates its own capacity for communication. The medium—speech—is the message, as Marshall McLuhan might have said. This means that speech is not oriented toward a specific end—as in the teleologically certified cultivation of reasonableness or care or democratic values. Rather it is oriented toward itself, its own condition of possibility, its own facticity, its auto-affection. Infant speech has no destiny (a direction it is supposed to develop toward) and no negation (a sacrifice of its origins). Instead, it is a kind of speech that brings into speech that which cannot be spoken (the inability to be able to and not to speak).

To theorize the potential for P4C to be an experiment in and of infancy, we will draw heavily on Agamben’s work. Our argument is that the redemption of P4C necessitates a shift from a community of inquiry (as the dialogic model underlying P4C) to a community of infancy (P41). It is a community because it is a common experience of language. And it is a community of infancy because this common experience of language emphasizes language’s speakability, its potentiality. In theorizing the practices of community ofinfancy, what will emerge is an experiment in language that is shared. P4C has a long-established record of advocating for a conceptualization of children as capable of philosophical dialogue in the name of democratic citizenship and care ethics. Our book takes up the practice of P4C and reconstitutes it according to the philosophy of Agamben in order to create a new practice: P4I. The key difference between P4C and P4I is a noninstrumental approach to education that does not focus on learning how to be reasonable (through critical, creative, and caring thinking) as a specific destiny of speech so much as the more basic and fundamental experience of a child’s incapacity to speak (the experience of infancy) as the primary philosophical and poetic experiment. This means that P4C can no longer be thought of in terms of destiny (producing reasonable citizens, for instance) or negation (the overcoming of phone and its replacement by logos or immaturity by maturity or irrational by rational speech). Instead, education emerges as a means without a prescribed destiny or as a pure means wherein children are exposed in a new way to the capacities they already have in the present moment: the potentiality for speaking. The upshot of this practice is that education can no longer be thought of as preparation for a life to come (democratic citizenship, for instance) so much as exposure to that which is closest and most familiar yet at the same time and for these very same reasons farthest away and most difficult to grasp. Without an end in sight to orient the practice, the educational logic of learning underlying and supporting P4C is rendered inoperative. What is left is an education of pure means, or an education in and of potentiality.

Even if we find kinship with critics of P4C, we would also like to emphasize that our project is not a rejection or even negation of the original practice. In fact, we find much in the traditional approach worth returning to and reevaluating through a messianic lens. For instance, Lipman’s earliest conceptualizations of P4C emphasize the centrality of metacognition. He encourages students to think about thinking or to learn how they learn. He concludes that teachers must help even very young children foster metacognition for “children are unlikely to reason better if they cannot reason about how they reason”? In this sense, community of inquiry is a process in thinking about the preconditions for thinking (inferencing about how one inferences, for instance). We agree with Lipman’s general point here. Bearing in mind Agamben’s notions of potentiality and infancy, we can argue that P4I is not an abandonment of Lipman’s articulation of P4C so much as its development, focusing explicitly on the need to offer children experiences of the potentiality for speaking. Infancy is an inquiry into the potentiality for speaking or speaking’s speakability. It does not concern what is said or how it ought to be said but rather that something can be said (speakability). It is therefore metacognitive. Or, as Agamben puts it, “philosophy is concerned with the pure existence of language, independent of its real properties [grammar]??? An experience of language’s speakability (its pure existence) should be valued. This is not about learning a metalanguage higher than the language of everyday speech (as in Lipman’s model of critical selfreflection) but rather an exposure to the word's speakability, its mediality. This is an immanent rather than transcendent model of metacognition. Instead of a mere means to an end (the development of reason or citizenship skills) through a particular metacognitive grammar and/or set of logical processes, speakability is a pure means, exposing the child to the contingencies of being a speaking being or the contingencies of language that do not have a destiny. Infancy resists the temptation to transform P4C into an instrument of the learning society. And it does so by being metacognitive but without an end.