I could, if more organised, have made a collection of testimony about the value people have found in knowing a stack of poetry by heart. I remember George Steiner somewhere talking about running an underground seminar over several years in, perhaps, Czechoslovakia. From time to time a student would stop appearing, only to turn up again months later explaining they’d been in prison where, lacking pen and paper, they’d occupied themselves in translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin from Russian to English, a poem over 200 pages long in the translation I looked at.
When our friends in other classes were told that their French master, Twelves, had told them how as a student he used to pace Sheffield Station reciting French verse in his head, I'm afraid we put that down along with his general demeanour to absurd Victorian stuffiness and lack of a real life.
I did, myself, though, use to know enough chunks by heart to keep myself happy for a while, though they weren’t very long -- 20-30 lines max, like the opening of the Canterbury Tales and, more arcanely, Dryden’s ‘Absolom and Achitophel’ which I thought hilarious, which in fact it is -- which makes me less dismissive that some that pupils might gain by reading Dryden. And speeches from Othello, as a result of starring in the school play (as Third Gentleman, around whom, as I explained in a long-lost article in a school magazine, the whole plot really turned).
I'm still taking Philosophie Magazine, because I think it’s good for me though I don’t get round to reading much of it. In the monthly feature, ‘Les Philosophes: L’Entretien’ the March issue has an interview with Stéphane Hessel, who I’d never heard of. Though trained in philosophy and involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, he is also a poet. Arrested in the Resistance he spent time in the camps:
The experience of Buchenwald, Rottleberode and Dora...showed me that knowing long poems by heart is an immeasurable resource. It’s as if you have opium on you, a substance that makes an arduous situation bearable. At Buchenwald I’d recite Paul Valéry’s Cimetière Marin Rilke’s Orphée and Villon’s La Ballade du Pendu to myself. Poetry is one of my vertical columns. It was like a medicine, it enabled me to hold on in the camps. It was more of a medicine for my soul than philosophy.
Not sure of my translation of some bits of that.
It seems to me that the fact that poetry can work like this is important and is insufficiently taken account of, let alone explained.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Do animals think like us?
Les animaux pensent-ils comme nous? is tomorrow’s topic at the Café Philo in Bondy (I presume that’s a town) for children, 3:30 to 5:00. (Then at 7:00 for adults there’s ‘Is there no happiness but in the moment?’.)
I like the idea of kids nipping down the philosophy caff after school.
Meanwhile in Le Havre there are ‘Philopop’ sessions, the first on ‘Education and Childhood’: ‘What are the reasons why education is necessary? what should its aim be?’’
These from the notices at the end of Philosophie magazine, which I still take (see label philosophy) down the side though rarely read much of -- there’s more than I could manage monthly even if it were in English -- 98 pages this month -- and even though there are lots of witty coloured pictures. Contents include: ‘What is life?’ ‘How could Aristotle justify slavery?’ and the monthly question this issue (‘Vos Questions’) is from ‘Nicolas, 6 ans’ who asks: ‘Clocks tell us the time but they don’t give a damn about the time. (...mais le temps elles s’en fichent). Is there a time for clocks? (or, Do clocks have a time?)’
Apparently there was an hors-série issue (?special issue) on ‘Tintin in the land of the philosophers’, about which some readers have written in with learned points arising from their great ‘intérêt tintinologique’. Perhaps I'll get it.
Debates on Obama are in this issue and topics that in this country would hardly count as philosophical, but also an article and pull-out on Voltaire, stuff on dreams and on night, interviews with philosophers, an article on Locke, book reviews (a Houellebecq novel, book by Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody attacking European ethnocentrism and a reissue of Sartre’s Sketch of a theory of the emotions).
One gets the sense that philosophy in France is broad and capacious and that the spirit it expresses is widely distributed in French society. Striking how many of the authors are teachers not in universities but in schools.
I like the idea of kids nipping down the philosophy caff after school.
Meanwhile in Le Havre there are ‘Philopop’ sessions, the first on ‘Education and Childhood’: ‘What are the reasons why education is necessary? what should its aim be?’’
These from the notices at the end of Philosophie magazine, which I still take (see label philosophy) down the side though rarely read much of -- there’s more than I could manage monthly even if it were in English -- 98 pages this month -- and even though there are lots of witty coloured pictures. Contents include: ‘What is life?’ ‘How could Aristotle justify slavery?’ and the monthly question this issue (‘Vos Questions’) is from ‘Nicolas, 6 ans’ who asks: ‘Clocks tell us the time but they don’t give a damn about the time. (...mais le temps elles s’en fichent). Is there a time for clocks? (or, Do clocks have a time?)’
Apparently there was an hors-série issue (?special issue) on ‘Tintin in the land of the philosophers’, about which some readers have written in with learned points arising from their great ‘intérêt tintinologique’. Perhaps I'll get it.
Debates on Obama are in this issue and topics that in this country would hardly count as philosophical, but also an article and pull-out on Voltaire, stuff on dreams and on night, interviews with philosophers, an article on Locke, book reviews (a Houellebecq novel, book by Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody attacking European ethnocentrism and a reissue of Sartre’s Sketch of a theory of the emotions).
One gets the sense that philosophy in France is broad and capacious and that the spirit it expresses is widely distributed in French society. Striking how many of the authors are teachers not in universities but in schools.
Monday, 30 March 2009
The differentness of France: Philosophie
Sad how France, which when I was young seemed a completely independent, excitingly different culture parallel with and equal to our own, now seems marginalised in the more global scene, just one subculture in a Europe that seems less significant by the day in comparison with the Anglophone world and the emerging giants in the east.
But Philosophie Magazine [click on the philosophy label in the right margin] stays as distinctive as ever, with no English equivalent that I know of. As I've said, if I were an English teacher now there’s stuff in it I'd be using.
March issue: cover theme: Pourquoi fait-on des enfants? Good question, good answers, good pics.
And how about this: in silence, write 600 words on ‘Silence’. We might once have had to in an O Level English Language exam, and we can imagine the sort of light, knowing, belles-lettristical whimsy we might have churned out. But which of us would have come up with this?
…. Silence has no need of silence to make itself heard. On the contrary. Whenever we mute a sound we testify to it. Every sentence acknowledges, in hidden words, the empire of the silence that bounds it. The word chatters, says Ionesco. The word is literature. The word is an escape. The word prevents silence from speaking. Silence is the last word of gabble, the unspoken of all speculation. Before its function in communication, speech represents a tacit pact amongst human beings who want to furnish the silence like an empty room, and then gag it. A wasted effort…. What is it that silence whispers? The solitude of humanity in the midst of things, and their contingent necessity to be just what they are. If the world wasn’t silent, we wouldn’t ask it so many questions. Confirming chance and disavowing reason, silence hallucinates exhalations of reality as the desert produces mirages of an oasis. No one would have a taste for hidden truths nor a worry about keeping ourselves amused without some direct intuition of an incurable silence. Silence is the father of God.
(These bits are from the middle. Some of my translation is just guessing.)
How French, how over-the-top ridiculous, how seductive. As with so much French writing, one wants to ask, exactly what sort of claims are these? Empirical? Universal? Necessary or a priori? How does he know? What would it be to argue against them? And I recall reading that French philosophy owes as much to rhetoric as to logic. How different…
The author is Raphäel Enthoven who we’re told has a programme on the Arte channel called Philosophie, Sundays at 1:00. If I could I'd watch it. Meanwhile, I love reading this stuff in which there’s just enough that isn’t nonsense.
Elsewhere there’s a conversation between the ‘Christian agnostic’ Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and the ‘Muslim existentialist’ Abdennour Bidar. Both rejected their upbringing and education, that of Schmitt atheistic and then (under Derrida) deconstructionist, Bidar’s ‘Muslim intellectual’ and then Sufi. Schmitt finds rationality lacking, Bidar mysticism without rationality. Weaned on the idea of the absurdity of the universe and, as a result having dried up as a writer, Schmitt turns to the mystical and aesthetic:
‘In western modernity, man isn’t God’s inheritor, he takes his place. He takes himself to be the source of meaning. In itself the world is absurd and meaningless, and it’s human consciousness that gives rise to the universe of meanings. ‘Absurdism’ comes from an immoderate pride, but in practice leads only to anguish. I increasingly detached myself from it to make contact again with mystery, the idea that there’s a meaning of which I'm not necessarily the source.’ Meanwhile, Bidar rewrites Islam to make it compatible with reason while resisting ‘absurdism’.
Plus: an ‘author dossier’ on Aristotle; an interview with Stanley Cavell, the American philosopher who writes about Shakespeare and cinema as well as the standard topics; a discussion of Marx and Engels’ claim that ‘philosophy is to the study of the real world as masturbation is to sexual love’; something on Deleuze; some Japanesse stuff; Montaigne…. I realise I'm only half way through and already April’s issue has arrived.
But Philosophie Magazine [click on the philosophy label in the right margin] stays as distinctive as ever, with no English equivalent that I know of. As I've said, if I were an English teacher now there’s stuff in it I'd be using.
March issue: cover theme: Pourquoi fait-on des enfants? Good question, good answers, good pics.
And how about this: in silence, write 600 words on ‘Silence’. We might once have had to in an O Level English Language exam, and we can imagine the sort of light, knowing, belles-lettristical whimsy we might have churned out. But which of us would have come up with this?…. Silence has no need of silence to make itself heard. On the contrary. Whenever we mute a sound we testify to it. Every sentence acknowledges, in hidden words, the empire of the silence that bounds it. The word chatters, says Ionesco. The word is literature. The word is an escape. The word prevents silence from speaking. Silence is the last word of gabble, the unspoken of all speculation. Before its function in communication, speech represents a tacit pact amongst human beings who want to furnish the silence like an empty room, and then gag it. A wasted effort…. What is it that silence whispers? The solitude of humanity in the midst of things, and their contingent necessity to be just what they are. If the world wasn’t silent, we wouldn’t ask it so many questions. Confirming chance and disavowing reason, silence hallucinates exhalations of reality as the desert produces mirages of an oasis. No one would have a taste for hidden truths nor a worry about keeping ourselves amused without some direct intuition of an incurable silence. Silence is the father of God.
(These bits are from the middle. Some of my translation is just guessing.)
How French, how over-the-top ridiculous, how seductive. As with so much French writing, one wants to ask, exactly what sort of claims are these? Empirical? Universal? Necessary or a priori? How does he know? What would it be to argue against them? And I recall reading that French philosophy owes as much to rhetoric as to logic. How different…
The author is Raphäel Enthoven who we’re told has a programme on the Arte channel called Philosophie, Sundays at 1:00. If I could I'd watch it. Meanwhile, I love reading this stuff in which there’s just enough that isn’t nonsense.
Elsewhere there’s a conversation between the ‘Christian agnostic’ Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and the ‘Muslim existentialist’ Abdennour Bidar. Both rejected their upbringing and education, that of Schmitt atheistic and then (under Derrida) deconstructionist, Bidar’s ‘Muslim intellectual’ and then Sufi. Schmitt finds rationality lacking, Bidar mysticism without rationality. Weaned on the idea of the absurdity of the universe and, as a result having dried up as a writer, Schmitt turns to the mystical and aesthetic:
‘In western modernity, man isn’t God’s inheritor, he takes his place. He takes himself to be the source of meaning. In itself the world is absurd and meaningless, and it’s human consciousness that gives rise to the universe of meanings. ‘Absurdism’ comes from an immoderate pride, but in practice leads only to anguish. I increasingly detached myself from it to make contact again with mystery, the idea that there’s a meaning of which I'm not necessarily the source.’ Meanwhile, Bidar rewrites Islam to make it compatible with reason while resisting ‘absurdism’.
Plus: an ‘author dossier’ on Aristotle; an interview with Stanley Cavell, the American philosopher who writes about Shakespeare and cinema as well as the standard topics; a discussion of Marx and Engels’ claim that ‘philosophy is to the study of the real world as masturbation is to sexual love’; something on Deleuze; some Japanesse stuff; Montaigne…. I realise I'm only half way through and already April’s issue has arrived.
Sunday, 23 November 2008
More excuses
No recent blogging: partly I’ve been out a lot, partly I've been doing a lot of writing otherwise, so don’t much feel like writing the blog as well.
I've been reading, scribbling and thinking around a paper that Jan Derry gave to our English Theory Group. She was arguing for certain conclusions that would follow for education from an ‘inferentialist’ epistemology and a correct understanding of Vygotsky’s roots in Hegel. One implication was that the imparting of knowledge in education is a matter of making the student familiar with the relevant ‘space of reasons’, a fuzzy and ill-defined but rich and complex zone of facts, concepts, ideas and associations.
I can’t briefly explain inferentialism, a promising recent line in philosophy associated with the names Sellars, Macdowell and Brandom. In the context of English, though, we non-philosophers were able to see, for instance, that if knowledge is as those philosophers say, you can’t effectively teach a single scene from Macbeth -- which, sadly, some schools try to -- by explaining what each line means. The only way is via a broad exposure to Shakespeare in lots of different guises and contexts. The kids have to begin to be at home in the Shakespeare ‘space’.
I've also been looking at a couple of books on Romanticism and the origins of English Studies in English universities and schools. According to Ian Reid (Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies, 2004) the whole enterprise was a Romantic endeavour, and continued to be heavily influenced at least into the late 1960s by Wordsworth’s poetry and his notions on education and development, national culture, religion, childhood, creativity and imagination. At the end he speculates briefly on how it might have been otherwise: if, for instance, English had taken its lead from the teaching of rhetoric in the Scottish universities (Adam Smith taught rhetoric), or from the teaching of practical English in the Dissenting Academies (sort of FE colleges for non-conformists heading into business) or had shaped itself as cultural studies without the current exclusive fixation on popular culture.
When you think of it, it’s not at all obvious why ‘imaginative literature’, and especially poetry, should be at the centre of one the central subjects in compulsory mass education.
What else? Well, with some colleagues I'm working on the history of English teaching in London schools in the post-war years 1945-65. This involves interviewing former teachersand students from, eventually, three schools. At the moment we’re concentrating on Walworth School, founded in Southwark as an experimental comprehensive school in 1946. (We’ve recently talked to someone who was a pupil in that first year.)
Finally, last night I went to a benefit bash in Bermondsey for a taxi-driver with cancer -- a vastly ambitious do, attended by, it seemed, 150-200, organised by extended family and friends. Quite a few ex-Walworth people were there, including some I'd once taught. Here’s a story that’s not unusual: R was in a ‘remedial’ (joint bottom stream) class; literacy levels were low; these kids -- as always when you create such groups (we later abolished them) -- weren’t expected to go anywhere much. R is now a manager in one of the big train companies with 400 people under him; his daughter has a Masters degree. He didn’t do much in school because he didn’t see any point -- which doesn’t mean he wasn’t getting anything out of it.
Our research is throwing up loads of stories like that. Because the school tried to give a decent education, whether or not the pupils were obviously benefiting at the time, when motivation kicked in (at work) some of what had been taught turned out to have taken. At least, so I like to think.
I've been reading, scribbling and thinking around a paper that Jan Derry gave to our English Theory Group. She was arguing for certain conclusions that would follow for education from an ‘inferentialist’ epistemology and a correct understanding of Vygotsky’s roots in Hegel. One implication was that the imparting of knowledge in education is a matter of making the student familiar with the relevant ‘space of reasons’, a fuzzy and ill-defined but rich and complex zone of facts, concepts, ideas and associations.
I can’t briefly explain inferentialism, a promising recent line in philosophy associated with the names Sellars, Macdowell and Brandom. In the context of English, though, we non-philosophers were able to see, for instance, that if knowledge is as those philosophers say, you can’t effectively teach a single scene from Macbeth -- which, sadly, some schools try to -- by explaining what each line means. The only way is via a broad exposure to Shakespeare in lots of different guises and contexts. The kids have to begin to be at home in the Shakespeare ‘space’.
I've also been looking at a couple of books on Romanticism and the origins of English Studies in English universities and schools. According to Ian Reid (Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies, 2004) the whole enterprise was a Romantic endeavour, and continued to be heavily influenced at least into the late 1960s by Wordsworth’s poetry and his notions on education and development, national culture, religion, childhood, creativity and imagination. At the end he speculates briefly on how it might have been otherwise: if, for instance, English had taken its lead from the teaching of rhetoric in the Scottish universities (Adam Smith taught rhetoric), or from the teaching of practical English in the Dissenting Academies (sort of FE colleges for non-conformists heading into business) or had shaped itself as cultural studies without the current exclusive fixation on popular culture.
When you think of it, it’s not at all obvious why ‘imaginative literature’, and especially poetry, should be at the centre of one the central subjects in compulsory mass education.
What else? Well, with some colleagues I'm working on the history of English teaching in London schools in the post-war years 1945-65. This involves interviewing former teachersand students from, eventually, three schools. At the moment we’re concentrating on Walworth School, founded in Southwark as an experimental comprehensive school in 1946. (We’ve recently talked to someone who was a pupil in that first year.)
Finally, last night I went to a benefit bash in Bermondsey for a taxi-driver with cancer -- a vastly ambitious do, attended by, it seemed, 150-200, organised by extended family and friends. Quite a few ex-Walworth people were there, including some I'd once taught. Here’s a story that’s not unusual: R was in a ‘remedial’ (joint bottom stream) class; literacy levels were low; these kids -- as always when you create such groups (we later abolished them) -- weren’t expected to go anywhere much. R is now a manager in one of the big train companies with 400 people under him; his daughter has a Masters degree. He didn’t do much in school because he didn’t see any point -- which doesn’t mean he wasn’t getting anything out of it.
Our research is throwing up loads of stories like that. Because the school tried to give a decent education, whether or not the pupils were obviously benefiting at the time, when motivation kicked in (at work) some of what had been taught turned out to have taken. At least, so I like to think.
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Update, misc
Rather than tackle a single topic I thought I'd post a few days of diary.
I posted an entry last week (8 Nov, Nature and Culture) about a bike ride along the Thames from Hampton Court to Kingston. As the scene had been striking but I hadn’t taken the camera I went out again on Saturday, this time with camera, when an intervening spell of wild and wet weather had been and gone. As it turned out, though, autumn had changed to winter; it was cold and the sky was dull. I've just been looking through the photographs and they’re drab. I conclude -- as so often before, though I never seem to learn -- that it’s a waste of time taking photographs when the light is poor. Which in this country means a lot of the time.
Still reading my Philosophie magazine. In the interests of economy I was going to not renew, but I got so much out of the latest issue that I changed my mind. Partly it’s good for my French which I'm trying to improve (including a conversation class at the French Institute) but also I learn something about philosophy (e.g, this week, Kant and Searle) and constantly come across articles about which I think something like this would go down well with older English secondary students. I may post a couple of extracts -- but I keep saying that and time spent blogging is time not spent reading, drifting or watching the Parliament channel or my unopened DVDs.
In the library today I got Raymond Williams’s book on Drama from Ibsen to Brecht to see what, if anything, he’d say about Pirandello (see earlier post). There is a chapter and he does discuss Six Characters in Search of an Author (see previous posting) but I found it unsatisfying: Williams seems to be saying that Pirandello was making some ‘professional’ (his word) points about the business of theatre; while I can see the things that made him say that (and I hadn’t picked them all up) I felt the play was existentially disturbing.
The Parliament Channel had the Commons debate about the expansion of Heathrow: again, riveting, the part I saw -- in the evening with 20 MPs max in the house. Superb speech -- fine example of rhetoric -- by John Gummer, who used to be the derided Tory minister John Selwyn Gummer. He spoke apparently without notes, with passion and strong arguments.
However, the final government speech, of which I saw part, was unsatisfying: it appeared that the minister didn’t seriously address points that had been made in the debate. I would have preferred at that point to have had him interviewed by a John Humphries (BBC journalist on the morning Today programme). Radio and TV don’t do rhetoric beyond the soundbite; parliamentary debate doesn’t do cross-examination -- except perhaps in committees, though I haven’t seen many of them yet and rather gather the government has too much control over the selection of chairs (I don’t know how members are chosen).
So, a good debate which I'm sure many people besides me would have enjoyed had they watched it -- and better entertainment, to my taste, than anything on the main terrestrial channels. But the Guardian the following morning had almost nothing on it: not even a mention, that I saw, of Gummer’s speech. Maybe the Guardian’s right: the number of us who would sit down and read even a ten minute speech may be minute.
One of our three good English teachersat Bradford Grammar School, Neville Newhouse, used to tell us not to be swayed by speeches we hear but to make a point of reading them, to avoid having our judgment swayed by rhetoric in the bad, restrictive sense. That was an example of the admirable grammar school emphasis on critical rationality: Susan Stebbing’s Clear and Crooked Thinking was much in vogue, I think. For Aristotle, of course, the logic of Gummer’s argument was as much part of his rhetoric as his appeal to the emotions.
I posted an entry last week (8 Nov, Nature and Culture) about a bike ride along the Thames from Hampton Court to Kingston. As the scene had been striking but I hadn’t taken the camera I went out again on Saturday, this time with camera, when an intervening spell of wild and wet weather had been and gone. As it turned out, though, autumn had changed to winter; it was cold and the sky was dull. I've just been looking through the photographs and they’re drab. I conclude -- as so often before, though I never seem to learn -- that it’s a waste of time taking photographs when the light is poor. Which in this country means a lot of the time.
Still reading my Philosophie magazine. In the interests of economy I was going to not renew, but I got so much out of the latest issue that I changed my mind. Partly it’s good for my French which I'm trying to improve (including a conversation class at the French Institute) but also I learn something about philosophy (e.g, this week, Kant and Searle) and constantly come across articles about which I think something like this would go down well with older English secondary students. I may post a couple of extracts -- but I keep saying that and time spent blogging is time not spent reading, drifting or watching the Parliament channel or my unopened DVDs.
In the library today I got Raymond Williams’s book on Drama from Ibsen to Brecht to see what, if anything, he’d say about Pirandello (see earlier post). There is a chapter and he does discuss Six Characters in Search of an Author (see previous posting) but I found it unsatisfying: Williams seems to be saying that Pirandello was making some ‘professional’ (his word) points about the business of theatre; while I can see the things that made him say that (and I hadn’t picked them all up) I felt the play was existentially disturbing.
The Parliament Channel had the Commons debate about the expansion of Heathrow: again, riveting, the part I saw -- in the evening with 20 MPs max in the house. Superb speech -- fine example of rhetoric -- by John Gummer, who used to be the derided Tory minister John Selwyn Gummer. He spoke apparently without notes, with passion and strong arguments.
However, the final government speech, of which I saw part, was unsatisfying: it appeared that the minister didn’t seriously address points that had been made in the debate. I would have preferred at that point to have had him interviewed by a John Humphries (BBC journalist on the morning Today programme). Radio and TV don’t do rhetoric beyond the soundbite; parliamentary debate doesn’t do cross-examination -- except perhaps in committees, though I haven’t seen many of them yet and rather gather the government has too much control over the selection of chairs (I don’t know how members are chosen).
So, a good debate which I'm sure many people besides me would have enjoyed had they watched it -- and better entertainment, to my taste, than anything on the main terrestrial channels. But the Guardian the following morning had almost nothing on it: not even a mention, that I saw, of Gummer’s speech. Maybe the Guardian’s right: the number of us who would sit down and read even a ten minute speech may be minute.
One of our three good English teachersat Bradford Grammar School, Neville Newhouse, used to tell us not to be swayed by speeches we hear but to make a point of reading them, to avoid having our judgment swayed by rhetoric in the bad, restrictive sense. That was an example of the admirable grammar school emphasis on critical rationality: Susan Stebbing’s Clear and Crooked Thinking was much in vogue, I think. For Aristotle, of course, the logic of Gummer’s argument was as much part of his rhetoric as his appeal to the emotions.
Sunday, 21 September 2008
English and the existential abyss
Philosophie Magazine, September issue: The editorial this month explains that they’ve hitherto kept away from thématiques existentielles, out of a fear of appearing to offer trendy nuggets of wisdom. Now they’ve decided they can’t avoid going beyond ‘theoretical thought’ to take on ‘lived thought’.
I like their concluding sentence: ‘L’ambition est de montrer qu’on peut traiter des vertiges existentiels avec des outils différents de ceux de la psychologie.’ Our ambition is to show that existential vertigos (Loss of existential bearings? vertiginous glimpses into the abyss?) can be addressed with other tools than those of psychology.
In my adolescence, one of those tools was literature. Less the literature studied in school than that in circulation in the sixth form, some of it introduced to us by Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956), including, I recall, Camus and Dostoevsky. Also Salinger, Sartre (fiction and plays), Beckett and Kerouac, and contemporary French plays put on at Bradford’s amateur Civic Theatre: Anouilh, Giroudoux, Cocteau. Films in a similar vein were shown there, equally powerful in their effect on us.
English, too, like philosophy in French schools, should be addressing, shouldn’t it, young people’s experiences of existential vertigo.
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Teenage philosophes
In Philosophie Magazine, in a section on Schopenhauer, among brief accounts by writers and intellectuals of how he has affected them, I find this by one Gabriel Matzneff (my attempt at translation):
“In my adolescence Arthur Schopenhauer was one of my masters; it is he who, more than Nietzche or Dostoyevsky, awoke the life of the mind in me. The state of mind in which, at 17, I was plunged by the discovery of his works was extreme. For example, the idea that the world is pure representation and that if one suppressed this the physical world vanishes… I was like a blind person who had had an operation to remove a cataract and who could suddenly see. Even today Schopenhauer remains an indispensible travelling companion. Exiled to a desert island with an allowance of only one book, I would choose *The World As Will and Representation.”
I wonder: in England, Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand… is any teenager awakened into intellectual awareness today by any philosopher? Do other kinds of works–e.g. literature (Dostoyevsky?) –have that effect?
Indeed, do adolescents still experience this sort of awakening at all? If so, what causes it these days?
That’s a genuine question. I have little to do people of that age any more and just don’t know.
I’d actually welcome comments on this, if you can work out how to do it.
“In my adolescence Arthur Schopenhauer was one of my masters; it is he who, more than Nietzche or Dostoyevsky, awoke the life of the mind in me. The state of mind in which, at 17, I was plunged by the discovery of his works was extreme. For example, the idea that the world is pure representation and that if one suppressed this the physical world vanishes… I was like a blind person who had had an operation to remove a cataract and who could suddenly see. Even today Schopenhauer remains an indispensible travelling companion. Exiled to a desert island with an allowance of only one book, I would choose *The World As Will and Representation.”
I wonder: in England, Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand… is any teenager awakened into intellectual awareness today by any philosopher? Do other kinds of works–e.g. literature (Dostoyevsky?) –have that effect?
Indeed, do adolescents still experience this sort of awakening at all? If so, what causes it these days?
That’s a genuine question. I have little to do people of that age any more and just don’t know.
I’d actually welcome comments on this, if you can work out how to do it.
Sunday, 11 May 2008
What should general education be about? The case of philosophy
What do you think of these as questions for the final school exams at 18?
Can the question ‘Who am I?’ be answered clearly?
Can the value of a culture be judged objectively?
What do we gain by working?
Can desire be satisfied by reality?
Does truth depend on us?
Can liberty be defined as the power to say no?
Do we desire only things we consider good?
Are works of art like other realities?
They’re all from le bac philo.
OK. In Paris the other day I saw this on a newsstand
and bought it. I already knew that the French school-leaving exam was the baccalauréat or bac and had a vague idea that philosophy was a main subject in France, part of general education, and not, as here, a recent minority one.
How could philosophy work as a mass subject, equivalent, perhaps, to English here? Wouldn’t it be far too difficult? Too abstract and cerebral? Perhaps this would tell me.
Well, it did, to an extent, taken with various other things found on the internet. Le bac philo is the final exam in philosophy, taken at A level/A2 stage. (I worked out that hors-série was ‘outside the series’, or a special issue of the magazine.)
In the lycée (the last three years of secondary) students specialise in arts and science (L – for Littéraire, I think), in science (S), or in social and economic science (ES). But they all take philosophy, though not for the same number of hours. (For students specialising in hôtellerie et danse, ‘la philo n’est pas souvent un priorité’. That I can believe.)
Why am I interested?
English is more my thing. What’s the issue?
The issue is, do I approve? Is this an idea we should copy? Or—since this sort of thing hasn’t been our style—are we right to prefer our style?
I'll say a bit more about the course before offering my thoughts.
Since I'm most interested in the arts/humanities side I looked at what the ‘L’ students do – which is eight hours of philosophy a week! (This from a good little New York Times article: LINK) ( A-level students taking only three subjects don’t get that amount of time for any of them.)
The exam
In the exam at the end of the final year candidates have four hours to write either an essay (dissertation) or an explication de texte, a commentary on a provided passage (my magazine has less about this option). For the dissertation there’s a choice of three topics, of which I put a sample at the top of this.
Here’s a fuller list of dissertation subjects set in recent years: LINK
The topics
The topics are great. The magazine groups them into five themes; the websites of different lycées have different arrangement, but the content is essentially the same, prescribed as it is by the government: LINK
This school site has schemes of work, lesson plans – the lot: LINK
It’s not clear to me how much the students are expected to read, but here, from the same lycée, is the prescribed list of authors, about whom the student should presumably know something and from whom they will have considered extracts:
Platon, Aristote, Épicure, Lucrèce, Sénèque, Cicéron, Épictète, Marc Aurèle, Plotin, Augustin, Averroès, Thomas d’Aquin, Ockham. Machiavel, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, Leibniz, Vico, Berkeley, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tocqueville, Comte, Cournot, Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Bergson, Alain, Russel, Bachelard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Popper, Sartre, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty.
(Those who know about these things will note a relative absence of recent Anglo-Saxon philosophers, and the inclusion of French writers who’d be unlikely to make it onto a UK curriculum.)
So what do I think?
My initial reaction was, and largely still is, what a great course: it’s about interesting ideas, it’s intellectually demanding and doesn’t underestimate what older adolescents are capable of; adolescence is the stage when, if all goes well, thinking is transformed by the capacity to handle abstraction – this gives that capability full rein. It demands an ability to write expository or argumentative prose; it takes seriously the idea that education is about reason. The topics are capable of being handled not just through the study of philosophical texts but through the sort of discussion that should be accessible to most students. In terms of humanities education, it involves the history of ideas from the Greeks to Sartre. The course seems capable of providing a broad cultural initiation, broader perhaps than anything our students get.
There can be no accusation here of the dumbing-down or anti-intellectualism that is so often attributed to English education. In France it’s unambiguously fine to be clever; and cleverness is what the philosophy bac is about.
In Britain we’re less sure what we feel about cleverness; and what it is we’re unsure about is well illustrated by what gets the high marks in the bac philo. (Samples from essays are included at the end of this entry.) Consider what’s involved in the essay or *dissertation.
Writing the Dissertation
Here’s (if your French is up to it) how you’re advised to use the four hours you get for your dissertation:
And here’s how you begin to tackle your chosen subject. You imagine you’re a little man [sic] and you literally get inside your subject: ‘With your little arms you join the terms that go together with a green rope, and you stretch a red rope between those that seem incompatible. With your little feet you give the different terms a kick to see how they react when they bump against their neighbours.’
Suppose your subject is, “Must we respect all cultures?” Then this is how you proceed:
(Note your little bonhomme at the bottom.) You tease out the contradictions and tensions until you get two alternative answers to the question: that’s your problématique. That gives you your first two main parts, which you then have to somehow resolve. Then, as you write the essay you’ll fill out the basic argument with arguments, facts, anecdotes, sayings of the philosophers etc.
What it amounts to then, so it seems to me, is performing operations on words and concepts. Given the discourse (the words and concepts from the question and from the course), you don’t need to go outside it, to experience, to common sense or indeed to your own actual reflections.
It’s as if arguments are purely structures (of words and definable ideas) that exist in their own special space and don’t have any necessary connection to your actual puzzling, agonising, living, experience and wondering.
This is to say, then, that the dissertation seems a purely rhetorical exercise, a business, in the old distinction, of dealing with words, not things (or reality). Doing well is a matter of being good with words and ideas. The advice above reminds me of nothing so much as the old rhetoric handbooks that taught you a vast array of clever ways to, well, chop logic, producing discourse by sheer manipulation of the language of the topic.
In this respect the bac philo seems a suitable preparation rather for lawyers and diplomats than the rest of us. What makes us particularly uneasy as English onlookers is perhaps that you could write a perfectly good argument and not believe a word of it. Hardly a democratic education for good citizens. Yet all citizens have to take the course.
The bac essay has this detached, disembodied character even though the topics of the course include ones that some students actually experience in their own lives as urgent and personal, ones about identity, freedom, work and relationships, for instance. For students who are struggling to find meaning in the universe, does not the bac essay seem offputtingly arid? Is this not an esoteric and artificial genre that has no existence outside the exam room? If they resemble anything at all, the model essays remind me of encyclopedia entries or textbook sections: is that what students are best learning to write? Or, if students are grappling with issues that are in part philosophical, and education is there to provide ways by which they can grapple to better effect, is this particular essay genre really the best medium we can find for them to work things out?
Not that I know what the right medium would be; though if it’s some sort of essay we have in mind, wouldn’t Hazlitt be a better model than, say, Russell (from the list of prescribed authors above)? I'm not sure what they should write, but what strikes me most forcibly is the huge gap between two sorts of student engagement: the student tackling a bac essay (pulling the terms apart, seeking contradictions etc), and the adolescent reading Camus’s L’Etranger (The Stranger or The Outsider); and I think how English teachers work to present literature not as an isolated self-contained world but as dealing, implicitly, with us and our lives.
I've recently seen Control (twice) about Ian Curtis and his late 70s Manchester group Joy Division. Curtis was a troubled, clever adolescent who read (see Jon Savage on him in yesterday’s Guardian: ‘Controlled Chaos’ – can’t find it on the website). In so far as the help he needed could have been had from education (if he’d stayed on), would the *bac philo have done the job? Well, there’s no knowing – he had intellectual tastes as well as powerful emotional thirsts – but I suspect he would have found most of it dryly academic and irrelevant.
That’s not quite true. He read Nietzsche and would probably have got a lot out of Sartre and some of the moderns, in terms of relevance to his own situation. But would the form of the bac essay given him the possibility of working through what these books and ideas meant to him? Or just of using them as the material from which to construct a judicious, elegant argument?
I'm genuinely not sure about this. Curtis might well have engaged in a serious and academically valid way with, say, Kant; and who knows how many kids in Britain might not be thirsting for an educational experience that’s so thrillingly cerebral and so little demanding of self-expression, sincerity and personal response.
I certainly have a lot more time for an education in rhetoric than I ever did as an English teacher, and I think there’s much to be said for including courses that are, precisely, detached and impersonal. (I'm very much in favour, too, of everyone who can benefit having an introduction to philosophy.) Education isn’t only, or perhaps primarily, for the sake of making personal sense of the world; it’s also about the knowledge and intellectual skills needed for functioning in the world, and ones that a person might choose to inhabit as a satisfying domain having little to do with the rest of one’s ‘real life’.
I'd like to know the bac philo works in reality, across the range of students. Can it really be a central element in a broad education for all 17-18-year-olds?
Examples of student dissertations
The magazine prints some model answers and some actual student essays, with comments. I think the approach both of the students and the markers reflects how I've characterised this exercise.
First, two pages (not sequential) from a model essay
Then an actual, less praised essay – again, not the whole thing:
Student videos about the bac philo
Google ‘bac philo’ and you’ll come up with any amount of stuff, including course guides and videos made by students. For instance, some at LINK, e.g. LINK
Other links
Some of this basic stuff about the French education system comes from a site on classics teaching: LINK
Link to
Can the question ‘Who am I?’ be answered clearly?
Can the value of a culture be judged objectively?
What do we gain by working?
Can desire be satisfied by reality?
Does truth depend on us?
Can liberty be defined as the power to say no?
Do we desire only things we consider good?
Are works of art like other realities?
They’re all from le bac philo.
OK. In Paris the other day I saw this on a newsstand
and bought it. I already knew that the French school-leaving exam was the baccalauréat or bac and had a vague idea that philosophy was a main subject in France, part of general education, and not, as here, a recent minority one.How could philosophy work as a mass subject, equivalent, perhaps, to English here? Wouldn’t it be far too difficult? Too abstract and cerebral? Perhaps this would tell me.
Well, it did, to an extent, taken with various other things found on the internet. Le bac philo is the final exam in philosophy, taken at A level/A2 stage. (I worked out that hors-série was ‘outside the series’, or a special issue of the magazine.)
In the lycée (the last three years of secondary) students specialise in arts and science (L – for Littéraire, I think), in science (S), or in social and economic science (ES). But they all take philosophy, though not for the same number of hours. (For students specialising in hôtellerie et danse, ‘la philo n’est pas souvent un priorité’. That I can believe.)
Why am I interested?
English is more my thing. What’s the issue?
The issue is, do I approve? Is this an idea we should copy? Or—since this sort of thing hasn’t been our style—are we right to prefer our style?
I'll say a bit more about the course before offering my thoughts.
Since I'm most interested in the arts/humanities side I looked at what the ‘L’ students do – which is eight hours of philosophy a week! (This from a good little New York Times article: LINK) ( A-level students taking only three subjects don’t get that amount of time for any of them.)
The exam
In the exam at the end of the final year candidates have four hours to write either an essay (dissertation) or an explication de texte, a commentary on a provided passage (my magazine has less about this option). For the dissertation there’s a choice of three topics, of which I put a sample at the top of this.
Here’s a fuller list of dissertation subjects set in recent years: LINK
The topics
The topics are great. The magazine groups them into five themes; the websites of different lycées have different arrangement, but the content is essentially the same, prescribed as it is by the government: LINK
This school site has schemes of work, lesson plans – the lot: LINK
It’s not clear to me how much the students are expected to read, but here, from the same lycée, is the prescribed list of authors, about whom the student should presumably know something and from whom they will have considered extracts:
Platon, Aristote, Épicure, Lucrèce, Sénèque, Cicéron, Épictète, Marc Aurèle, Plotin, Augustin, Averroès, Thomas d’Aquin, Ockham. Machiavel, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, Leibniz, Vico, Berkeley, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Tocqueville, Comte, Cournot, Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Bergson, Alain, Russel, Bachelard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Popper, Sartre, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty.
(Those who know about these things will note a relative absence of recent Anglo-Saxon philosophers, and the inclusion of French writers who’d be unlikely to make it onto a UK curriculum.)
So what do I think?
My initial reaction was, and largely still is, what a great course: it’s about interesting ideas, it’s intellectually demanding and doesn’t underestimate what older adolescents are capable of; adolescence is the stage when, if all goes well, thinking is transformed by the capacity to handle abstraction – this gives that capability full rein. It demands an ability to write expository or argumentative prose; it takes seriously the idea that education is about reason. The topics are capable of being handled not just through the study of philosophical texts but through the sort of discussion that should be accessible to most students. In terms of humanities education, it involves the history of ideas from the Greeks to Sartre. The course seems capable of providing a broad cultural initiation, broader perhaps than anything our students get.
There can be no accusation here of the dumbing-down or anti-intellectualism that is so often attributed to English education. In France it’s unambiguously fine to be clever; and cleverness is what the philosophy bac is about.
In Britain we’re less sure what we feel about cleverness; and what it is we’re unsure about is well illustrated by what gets the high marks in the bac philo. (Samples from essays are included at the end of this entry.) Consider what’s involved in the essay or *dissertation.
Writing the Dissertation
Here’s (if your French is up to it) how you’re advised to use the four hours you get for your dissertation:
And here’s how you begin to tackle your chosen subject. You imagine you’re a little man [sic] and you literally get inside your subject: ‘With your little arms you join the terms that go together with a green rope, and you stretch a red rope between those that seem incompatible. With your little feet you give the different terms a kick to see how they react when they bump against their neighbours.’Suppose your subject is, “Must we respect all cultures?” Then this is how you proceed:
(Note your little bonhomme at the bottom.) You tease out the contradictions and tensions until you get two alternative answers to the question: that’s your problématique. That gives you your first two main parts, which you then have to somehow resolve. Then, as you write the essay you’ll fill out the basic argument with arguments, facts, anecdotes, sayings of the philosophers etc.
What it amounts to then, so it seems to me, is performing operations on words and concepts. Given the discourse (the words and concepts from the question and from the course), you don’t need to go outside it, to experience, to common sense or indeed to your own actual reflections.
It’s as if arguments are purely structures (of words and definable ideas) that exist in their own special space and don’t have any necessary connection to your actual puzzling, agonising, living, experience and wondering.
This is to say, then, that the dissertation seems a purely rhetorical exercise, a business, in the old distinction, of dealing with words, not things (or reality). Doing well is a matter of being good with words and ideas. The advice above reminds me of nothing so much as the old rhetoric handbooks that taught you a vast array of clever ways to, well, chop logic, producing discourse by sheer manipulation of the language of the topic.
In this respect the bac philo seems a suitable preparation rather for lawyers and diplomats than the rest of us. What makes us particularly uneasy as English onlookers is perhaps that you could write a perfectly good argument and not believe a word of it. Hardly a democratic education for good citizens. Yet all citizens have to take the course.
The bac essay has this detached, disembodied character even though the topics of the course include ones that some students actually experience in their own lives as urgent and personal, ones about identity, freedom, work and relationships, for instance. For students who are struggling to find meaning in the universe, does not the bac essay seem offputtingly arid? Is this not an esoteric and artificial genre that has no existence outside the exam room? If they resemble anything at all, the model essays remind me of encyclopedia entries or textbook sections: is that what students are best learning to write? Or, if students are grappling with issues that are in part philosophical, and education is there to provide ways by which they can grapple to better effect, is this particular essay genre really the best medium we can find for them to work things out?
Not that I know what the right medium would be; though if it’s some sort of essay we have in mind, wouldn’t Hazlitt be a better model than, say, Russell (from the list of prescribed authors above)? I'm not sure what they should write, but what strikes me most forcibly is the huge gap between two sorts of student engagement: the student tackling a bac essay (pulling the terms apart, seeking contradictions etc), and the adolescent reading Camus’s L’Etranger (The Stranger or The Outsider); and I think how English teachers work to present literature not as an isolated self-contained world but as dealing, implicitly, with us and our lives.
I've recently seen Control (twice) about Ian Curtis and his late 70s Manchester group Joy Division. Curtis was a troubled, clever adolescent who read (see Jon Savage on him in yesterday’s Guardian: ‘Controlled Chaos’ – can’t find it on the website). In so far as the help he needed could have been had from education (if he’d stayed on), would the *bac philo have done the job? Well, there’s no knowing – he had intellectual tastes as well as powerful emotional thirsts – but I suspect he would have found most of it dryly academic and irrelevant.
That’s not quite true. He read Nietzsche and would probably have got a lot out of Sartre and some of the moderns, in terms of relevance to his own situation. But would the form of the bac essay given him the possibility of working through what these books and ideas meant to him? Or just of using them as the material from which to construct a judicious, elegant argument?
I'm genuinely not sure about this. Curtis might well have engaged in a serious and academically valid way with, say, Kant; and who knows how many kids in Britain might not be thirsting for an educational experience that’s so thrillingly cerebral and so little demanding of self-expression, sincerity and personal response.
I certainly have a lot more time for an education in rhetoric than I ever did as an English teacher, and I think there’s much to be said for including courses that are, precisely, detached and impersonal. (I'm very much in favour, too, of everyone who can benefit having an introduction to philosophy.) Education isn’t only, or perhaps primarily, for the sake of making personal sense of the world; it’s also about the knowledge and intellectual skills needed for functioning in the world, and ones that a person might choose to inhabit as a satisfying domain having little to do with the rest of one’s ‘real life’.
I'd like to know the bac philo works in reality, across the range of students. Can it really be a central element in a broad education for all 17-18-year-olds?
Examples of student dissertations
The magazine prints some model answers and some actual student essays, with comments. I think the approach both of the students and the markers reflects how I've characterised this exercise.
First, two pages (not sequential) from a model essay
Then an actual, less praised essay – again, not the whole thing:
Student videos about the bac philo
Google ‘bac philo’ and you’ll come up with any amount of stuff, including course guides and videos made by students. For instance, some at LINK, e.g. LINK
Other links
Some of this basic stuff about the French education system comes from a site on classics teaching: LINK
Link to
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
English for the dawn of sanity: bats
Here’s one of my opinionated ideas about the sort of thing English should be doing once we’ve got the government off our backs. This is the sort of thing I'd be trying now if I were teaching in a comprehensive school again.
Kids of all ages are receptive to philosophy. Science and RE quite obviously give rise to philosophical issues, but English should get in there too. (That certainly calls for a longer discussion; part of the idea is that we should expand our concept of literature to include a much wider range of texts, beyond fiction, poetry and drama -- and travel.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14939179@N00/521926383/
Consider the case of bats. Give your students the following three paragraphs (and the extra ones below if you think they might be up to it). (Some students, if not all, should be exposed to this sort of prose, but in a context where you’re there to help them with it.)
I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.
That’s Thomas Nagel, 1974, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html
A more familiar form of the same problem is explaining what sight is to someone blind from birth. For all the dissection of human organs of sight or bat organs of sonar, no one can convey in words what it is like to see or ‘sone’ (we need a verb) to someone who has not experienced them.
Let the kids have a go. ‘You’re a bat with human speech: explain what the world is like. Remember that you can’t use words like ‘see’ in your explanation because you’ve no idea what seeing is like (except in expressions like ‘It must be something like what you call seeing’).’
Knowing that bats use sonar is like knowing that we use sound waves and vibrating tympanums or light waves; but our experience isn’t of waves: we hear and see things, the world, not vibrations and excitations.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandoncrain/493932874/
To do a good job of explaining his or her experience, our talking bat is going to have to find equivalents for the range of our sense terms: we not only see but look at (that view is nice to look at); we hear and listen (to); think of the different senses of feel (feel a touch, feel the door to find the keyhole in the dark). But no array of terms will do it for us, because experience is incommunicable unless the listener already knows something close to it.
Nagel’s point is that there’s no ‘just’ about experience: you can’t say that seeing is just having light impact on our retina etc., in the way that you can, in some sense, say that heat in an iron bar is just the excitation of atoms, or mass is just energy. No Martian analysing our eyes would get any idea of seeing from them; no inspection of tissues would show what pain is like. No examination of brains shows what it is like to have a mind.
The general issue is about conscious experience: what is it, how do we know what has it and how can science deal with it? (Does a computer have it? Could it?)
Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. / We may call this the subjective character of experience.
For good measure, if the class is interested, throw these at them:
And if there's conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.
….in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us. The structure of their own minds might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is like to be us….
Does it make sense… to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me?
It’s good for students, too, to be exposed to those typical philosophical moves: ‘Does it make sense to ask or say X?’ and (elsewhere in the article) ‘It’s hard to attach any meaning to the idea that…’
Finally, no harm in imparting a bit of basic know-how about academic life. In fact, if you’re hoping that students will go to university from families that have never sent anyone there, the more of that you do the better. Like, What is a university? What’s it for? What is a department? What are degrees? What’s a professor?
To that end, tell them the provenance of the article: The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50.
It’s a journal. What’s that? Show them one – it’s not exactly a magazine. Talk about the role of publication in academic life. What are the Roman numbers (can they read them? Should they not be able to? Teach them!) Explain volume and issue and page references. How can a single journal have 435 pages? It doesn’t – the volume does. Etc. Don’t make a meal of it, but miss no chance to let them in on these secrets of the ways of (parts of) the adult world. I know you’re an English teacher, but don’t be afraid to tell them stuff.
That’s what I now think. I’m afraid I didn’t always.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/giovannimari/1358043992/
Kids of all ages are receptive to philosophy. Science and RE quite obviously give rise to philosophical issues, but English should get in there too. (That certainly calls for a longer discussion; part of the idea is that we should expand our concept of literature to include a much wider range of texts, beyond fiction, poetry and drama -- and travel.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14939179@N00/521926383/
Consider the case of bats. Give your students the following three paragraphs (and the extra ones below if you think they might be up to it). (Some students, if not all, should be exposed to this sort of prose, but in a context where you’re there to help them with it.)
I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.
That’s Thomas Nagel, 1974, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bistrosavage/9712079/
A more familiar form of the same problem is explaining what sight is to someone blind from birth. For all the dissection of human organs of sight or bat organs of sonar, no one can convey in words what it is like to see or ‘sone’ (we need a verb) to someone who has not experienced them.
Let the kids have a go. ‘You’re a bat with human speech: explain what the world is like. Remember that you can’t use words like ‘see’ in your explanation because you’ve no idea what seeing is like (except in expressions like ‘It must be something like what you call seeing’).’
Knowing that bats use sonar is like knowing that we use sound waves and vibrating tympanums or light waves; but our experience isn’t of waves: we hear and see things, the world, not vibrations and excitations.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandoncrain/493932874/To do a good job of explaining his or her experience, our talking bat is going to have to find equivalents for the range of our sense terms: we not only see but look at (that view is nice to look at); we hear and listen (to); think of the different senses of feel (feel a touch, feel the door to find the keyhole in the dark). But no array of terms will do it for us, because experience is incommunicable unless the listener already knows something close to it.
Nagel’s point is that there’s no ‘just’ about experience: you can’t say that seeing is just having light impact on our retina etc., in the way that you can, in some sense, say that heat in an iron bar is just the excitation of atoms, or mass is just energy. No Martian analysing our eyes would get any idea of seeing from them; no inspection of tissues would show what pain is like. No examination of brains shows what it is like to have a mind.
The general issue is about conscious experience: what is it, how do we know what has it and how can science deal with it? (Does a computer have it? Could it?)
Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. / We may call this the subjective character of experience.
For good measure, if the class is interested, throw these at them:
And if there's conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us.
….in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us. The structure of their own minds might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is like to be us….
Does it make sense… to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me?
It’s good for students, too, to be exposed to those typical philosophical moves: ‘Does it make sense to ask or say X?’ and (elsewhere in the article) ‘It’s hard to attach any meaning to the idea that…’
Finally, no harm in imparting a bit of basic know-how about academic life. In fact, if you’re hoping that students will go to university from families that have never sent anyone there, the more of that you do the better. Like, What is a university? What’s it for? What is a department? What are degrees? What’s a professor?
To that end, tell them the provenance of the article: The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50.
It’s a journal. What’s that? Show them one – it’s not exactly a magazine. Talk about the role of publication in academic life. What are the Roman numbers (can they read them? Should they not be able to? Teach them!) Explain volume and issue and page references. How can a single journal have 435 pages? It doesn’t – the volume does. Etc. Don’t make a meal of it, but miss no chance to let them in on these secrets of the ways of (parts of) the adult world. I know you’re an English teacher, but don’t be afraid to tell them stuff.
That’s what I now think. I’m afraid I didn’t always.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/giovannimari/1358043992/
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