(Published in Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Newsletter 2010-11.)
Who says philosophers of education can’t have fun?
Michael Hand
Institute of Education, University of London
The concept of education. The child’s mind. Equality of educational opportunity. Blah blah blah. Here’s a radical thought. What if philosophers of education didn’t have to address themselves exclusively to the tiresomely serious business of making the world a better place for the next generation of learners? What if we were allowed, just once in a while, to philosophise about something fun? Like drinking whiskey. Or going for a run. Or watching Monty Python.
Well, you may be interested to learn that exploration of this liberating possibility is already underway. There is within the PESGB membership a small band of dissidents who have recently trained their philosophical gaze on just these topics, boldly setting their faces against the stifling presumption that the questions we ask have to matter. Lest it be thought that I pretend to objectivity, let me be explicit: this is a group to which I’m proud to be the newest recruit, so I write here with the bias and zeal of a convert.
First off the blocks was Harry Brighouse, with an essay in Open Court’s Monty Python and Philosophy (Brighouse, 2006). The philosophical references in Monty Python are, of course, legendary, from the Bruces’ Philosophers Song (‘Wittgenstein was a beery swine’), to the Philosophers Football Match (‘Socrates heads in and Leibniz doesn’t have a chance’), to the laundrette clash between Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion over the correct interpretation of Sartre’s Roads to Freedom. Harry takes as his text the Argument Clinic sketch, in which a man seeking the services of a professional arguer is frustrated to find that he is merely contradicted at every turn:
Customer: I came here for a good argument.
Mr Vibrating: No you didn’t; no, you came here for an argument.
Customer: An argument isn’t just contradiction.
Mr Vibrating: It can be.
Customer: No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of
statements intended to establish a proposition.
Mr. Vibrating: No it isn’t.
One of the reasons this sketch is funny is that people in the real world do not often visit argument clinics. The question Harry poses is whether they should. His case for an affirmative answer rests not on the pleasures to be found in a ‘mental game of tennis’, nor on the thought that a world with argument clinics is a world in which philosophers would make more money (though he admits the appeal of that prospect); but rather on the claim that ‘only though a process of argument with other people can most of us hope to come to have true beliefs about matters of any complexity’. This is so because others ‘alert us to perspectives and reasons we would not have been able to conjure up on our own’. The Brighousian defence of argument clinics, then, is none other than the Millian defence of liberty of thought: the good reasons we have for not silencing views contrary to our own are also good reasons for seeking out opportunities to argue against them, ideally in clinics staffed by well-paid philosophers.
The logic of Harry’s argument is compelling (and fortunately not at all dependent on his scandalous and scurrilous assertion that ‘the method most contemporary philosophers use is what Rawls calls reflective equilibrium’). And the essay has some fine comic touches: one autobiographical anecdote about a homophonic mix-up offers the exquisite mental image of Sylvester Stallone portraying Arthur Rimbaud. A bonus for philosophical readers is the flattering suggestion that the kind of creativity deployed by the Pythons in composing their absurd sketches is the very kind required to construct philosophical thought experiments: Hey! We’re cut from the same cloth as Cleese and Palin! An auspicious start, then, for a brave new trend in philosophy of education.
Next up was Chris Martin, erstwhile editor of this very organ, with a contribution to Wiley-Blackwell’s Running and Philosophy (Martin, 2007). Chris sets out to answer the scepticism of the non-runner with an ambitious, Deweyan defence of the aesthetic value of running. He concedes, reasonably enough, that ‘sweaty running clothes, skin chafe and foot blisters are not aesthetically pleasing’, and makes it clear at the outset that his concern is not with the visual allure of ‘the living sculpture wrapped in Spandex and Ray-Ban sunglasses’ (though, having seen Chris run, I do not think this allure should be lightly dismissed). Rather, the aesthetic value of running lies in the experience of ‘equilibrium between ourselves and the environment’.
In sketching the contours of this experience, Chris observes that running has ‘a distinct beginning and a distinct end’, distinguishing it from the blurry fuzz of activity that results from trying to ‘multi-task at the office or complete an endless list of errands at home’. It has ‘a clear and overriding focus’, in the sense that, when we are running, that is all we are doing. And it integrates the active and the passive, the making and the appreciating elements of artistic experience, in ‘a balanced relationship between what is done and what is undergone’.
As someone who has recently, and reluctantly, taken up running with a view to making it to 40, I cannot pretend that I was wholly persuaded by this argument. At present, the sweat, chafing and blisters are rather more striking features of my running experience than the equilibrium between self and surroundings. I’m all in favour of activities with distinct beginnings and ends and clear, overriding foci, and I share Chris’s aversion to multi-tasking and domestic chores, but such preferences can surely be satisfied less energetically. Notwithstanding the cacophony of Pixar movies, Nintendo games, filial badgering and spousal nagging characteristic of my own domestic circumstances, for example, I find myself able to give just this kind of undivided and obdurate attention to a tumbler or two of Glenfiddich.
Which brings us nicely to Harvey Siegel’s essay in Wiley-Blackwell’s Whiskey and Philosophy (Siegel, 2009), an essay singled out for special praise in the pages of whiskey drinkers’ Bible Malt Advocate: ‘[Siegel’s contribution] was a favourite, an experience in the heart of Scotland’s distilling country that combined whiskey, friendship, history, and a deeply personal, even spiritual understanding of the way whiskey can be so much more than just a drink’ (Bryson, 2010). Harvey’s chapter belongs to the genre that Christians of a certain stripe are wont to call ‘testimony’: he presents us with an autobiographical account of his development as a whiskey drinker, beginning with his early experiences of Seven & Seven (Seagram’s 7 and 7-Up) at the weddings and bar mitzvahs of his youth, and culminating in a quasi-religious experience in the wilds of Scotland, at the point ‘where the Fiddich meets the Spey’. It’s an absorbing and heartfelt story, and effortlessly convinced at least this whiskey dilettante that he ought to pay closer attention to what he’s drinking in future.
Notwithstanding these merits, the essay is disappointingly light on philosophy. Harvey waves loose philosophical threads under our noses but declines to tug at any of them. We learn that, though ‘a professional atheist’, he has done his best, over the years, ‘to find strengths in pro-theistic arguments (and have in fact found many)’: what these strengths might be we can only guess at. We learn too that he is prepared to describe his experience at the point where the rivers meet as ‘spiritual’, even as bespeaking a cosmic purpose: ‘Surely, it seemed, this is the way this place, and these lives, were meant to be’. But he offers no interrogation of the experience and merely reasserts his belief that it cannot have ‘anything to do with a God, at least as traditionally conceived’. Well, then what does it have to do with?
Finally, my own foray into philosophical frivolity is to be found in Open Court’s Doctor Who and Philosophy (Hand, 2010). I am not well-placed to review this essay, so shall confine myself to a summary of its argument. I ask what light, if any, is shed on the logical possibility of life after death by the phenomenon of Time Lord regeneration. Whether regeneration is an instance of resurrection or only an analogue of it (and this, of course, is a vexed question in Doctor Who lore), the resemblance between them brings into focus the puzzles about identity central to philosophical discussions of post-mortem existence. I argue that we ought to favour a bodily continuity view of identity and that, contrary to what is sometimes supposed, such a view is compatible with religious belief in an afterlife.
Philosophers of education can have fun. Quod erat demonstrandum.
References
Brighouse, H. (2006) ‘Why is an Argument Clinic Less Silly Than an Abuse Clinic or a Contradiction Clinic?’, in G.L. Hardcastle & G.A. Reisch (eds) Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think!, Peru, Illinois: Open Court.
Bryson, L. (2010) ‘Whiskey, Philosophy and Whiskey & Philosophy’, in Malt Advocate, Spring 2010.
Hand, M. (2010) ‘Regeneration, Replication and the Resurrection of the Dead’, in C.G. Lewis & P. Smithka (eds) Doctor Who and Philosophy, Peru, Illinois: Open Court.
Martin, C. (2007) ‘John Dewey and the Beautiful Stride: Running as Aesthetic Experience’, in M. Austin (ed) Running and Philosophy: A Marathon for the Mind, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Siegel, H. (2009) ‘Where the Fiddich Meets the Spey: My Religious Experience’, in A. Allhoff & M.P. Adams (eds) Whiskey and Philosophy: A Small Batch of Spirited Ideas, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.