Parallel convergences: thinking with biesta about philosophy and education

Convergências paralelas: pensando com biesta sobre filosofia e educação

Convergencias paralelas: pensando con biesta sobre filosofía y educación.

At the very core of this response there is a question: what kind of dialogue is possible between P4wC and Gert Biesta's educational thinking?¹ I would like to take my cue from the particular style of argumentation that Biesta deploys when addressing P4wC, both in his recent speech in Madrid and in a previous contribution (BIESTA, 2011). In both cases, with some different nuances, he highlights the risk that P4wC ends up turning into just one more programme in critical thinking and becoming accomplice with an instrumentalisation of philosophy in education, which could be not completely immune from some affinities with the trends of "learnification" ruling the contemporary educational scene (BIESTA, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2017a). While not concealing his misgivings and his perplexities, Biesta engages with P4wC either through an "indirect argument" (see BIESTA, 2017b, p. 432; 449)² or by specifying that his "aim is to suggest an additional rather than an alternative view about the educational use of philosophy" (BIESTA, 2011, p. 307).

I propose reading this language of 'indirectness' and of 'additionality' in terms of a willingness to dialogue. Biesta's aforementioned passage continues as follows:

This means that I do not have the ambition to suggest a new 'programme' for philosophy in education but rather wish to suggest a perspective that can act as a reminder of a different way in which one can 'engage' with philosophy-which in a sense can also be read as a reminder about how philosophy might 'engage' with us. (BIESTA, 2011, p. 307).

One could argue that Biesta is simply saying that he wants to play an entirely different game, which does not have anything in common with P4wC. In my idiosyncratic reading (which is admittedly, as a P4wC practitioner, self-interested), the choice of presenting his proposal as "additional" (as distinct from "alternative"³) could be construed as a sign of a readiness to open a space for dialogue, inviting the P4wC community to look at the matter also and additionally from other viewpoints, and as showing interest in exploring the potentialities inherent in P4wC practice.⁴

In other words, on this interpretation, while identifying certain risks in the way in which P4wC is carried out, Biesta does not dismiss it as just one more constructivist pedagogy accessory to the dominant habitus of "learnification," but seems to be ready to see it as a possible interlocutor, if only in the sense of thinking together about education, childhood and philosophy, with the aim of finding new vocabularies to overturn the dominance of the "discourse of learning" (see BINGHAM, 2015).⁵ It is hardly necessary to say that postulating the possibility of a dialogue does not imply any warrant of a final synthesis or agreement. Actually, this is not even anticipated. What is important is the very fact of inhabiting this space of/for dialogue, and exploring its dimensions.

In his latest book - the fourth volume of his trilogy, as he humorously calls it - Biesta writes that the ideas offered there are "not just meant as ideas to think about - and hence to agree or disagree with - but perhaps first and foremost as ideas to think with" (BIESTA, 2017a, pos. 217). It is in this spirit that I will address some of his views in the following, principally in reference to the question of the community of philosophical inquiry (henceforth CPI). In my concluding remarks, I will return to the question from which I have taken my cue, and will offer two possible ways of framing the dialogue between P4wC and Biesta's thinking.

In his speech in Madrid, Biesta stated from the very beginning that he was going to speak "as an outsider, outside of 'philosophical work with children,' outside of philosophy" (BIESTA, 2017b, p. 437).⁶ The climax of the sentence is not only rhetorically forceful but very revealing at the theoretical level. As I suggest interpreting him, Biesta did not confine himself to recognizing that he would not address the audience as an expert of P4wC but, more fundamentally, that he would address them from without philosophy. He added that this would be the case because he considered himself "to be an educationalist," that is, one who asks "educational questions" (BIESTA, 2017b, p. 437). Finally, he specified that his misgivings about P4wC are derived from a distancing from (Western) philosophy in its "analytical-logical" tradition, which blocks other possible (more "phenomenological and speculative") approaches, and leads to educational practices privileging a "strongly conceptual and verbal" intercourse with the world, thus running a risk of a "mentalisation" (Biesta, 2017b, p. 418) of the educational endeavour. Although only introductory (and even cursory in the speech as a whole), these remarks are particularly important in understanding how Biesta's misgivings about P4wC are rooted in a radical view of philosophy and the nature of its relationships with education.

I am going to engage with these concerns by understanding them as a Levinasian move, which I would like to approach indirectly. Adolpho Lingis (1994), the American translator of Levinas, characterises the emergence of Greek philosophy in terms of the substitution of the rational community for the existential encounter of the stranger qua stranger:

In the mercantile port cities of Greece, strangers arrive who ask the Greeks, Why do you do as you do? In all societies where groups of humans elaborate their distinctness, the answer was and is, because our fathers have taught us to do so, because our gods have decreed that it be so. Something new begins when the Greeks begin to give a reason that the stranger, who does not have these fathers and these gods, can accept. [...] The one who so answers commits himself to his statement, commits himself to supply a reason and a reason for the reason [...]. (LINGIS, 1994, pp. 3-4)

The establishment of the rational community is, accordingly, an operation of 'e-strangement'⁷ of the stranger, an erasing of her/his strangeness by building the conditions for a commonality of discourse. In this view, reason is an 'estrangement' from the existential plane, a shift from the 'indexicality' of the existential plenum to the domain of abstract symbols:

The rational community produces, and is produced by, a common discourse in a much stronger sense. The insights of individuals are formulated in universal categories, such that they are detached from the here-now index of the one who first formulated them. [...] Then, when any rational agent speaks, he speaks as a representative of the common discourse. (LINGIS, 1994, pp. 109-110)

Lingis reminds us, therefore, that

[b]efore the rational community, there was the encounter with the other, the intruder. The encounter begins with the one who exposes himself to the demand and contestation of the other. Beneath the rational community [...] is another community, the community that demands that the one who has his own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose himself to the one with whom he has nothing in common, the stranger. (LINGIS, 1994, p. 10)

Biesta (2006) appropriates this distinction and inflects it in educational terms. He highlights "the role of schools and other educational institutions [...] in the constitution and reproduction of rational communities [...] Schools provide students with a very specific voice, namely, with the voice of the rational communities it represents through the curriculum" (BIESTA, 2006, pp. 56-57). And while not denying the importance of this 'function,' he warns us as educators that "we also shouldn't forget that this is not all that matters in life - and that it is perhaps even the case that what ultimately matters is not the reproduction of rational communities but the possibility for the other community to come and stay into existence" (BIESTA, 2006, p. 68).

Against this backdrop, one of the pillars of P4wC seems to be in question: is the project of transforming our classrooms into CPIs merely the continuation of the modern project of building schools as rational communities by other means? Despite all the appeals to the recovery of the children's voices in their uniqueness, do CPIs work for an estrangement of those voices in their participation in the common discourse of reason? To mobilise Biesta's language in his Madrid address: by instantiating a Deweyan-Meadean form of communication,⁸ CPIs would, then, be the place where a child encounters the other just as someone with whom s/he is in communication and not as "someone who speaks to [her/him], who addresses [her/him], who touches [her/him], someone who asks for [her/him], or with a phrase from Levinas [...], who 'calls upon the unique in [her/him]'" (BIESTA, 2017b, p. 426; 444).

In cultivating the subjectivity of the one "who raises questions" CPIs would not be able to open up that space in which the "I is in question" - that is, the space in which subject-ness may come into existence (BIESTA, 2017a). Within this interpretive horizon, Biesta's vocabulary of "indirectness" and "additionality" would be the sign that education as he invites us to see it can happen not within CPIs but only as their "interruption" and "suspension." His willingness to dialogue would consist, then, at the most in the recognition that CPIs may be beneficial in promoting rational communities along less traditional and more thought-provoking lines, by involving also other dimensions of thinking (e.g. creativeness and caring), which are usually neglected in other pedagogies, but he would insist that they comply with a traditional task of schooling and perpetuate the privilege of the being "in the head" (BIESTA, 2017b, p. 418; 438) instead of "existing in and with the world as subjects" (BIESTA, 2017b, p. 430). Such a 'fundamental' (= going to the very foundations of the P4wC project) challenge would require a more elaborate discussion than is possible within the framework of this response. However, I am ready to admit that this is one way in which the dialogue between P4wC and Biesta could be framed.

On the other hand, I would like to hint at the possibility of another way of staying in a dialogue with Biesta. I do not aim at reaching any synthesis between the two 'perspectives' but only to indicate whether and how we can think with his ideas within the framework of CPI. Due to space constraints, I will confine myself to just one theme.⁹ In the wake of Masschelein and Simons (2013) characterisation of school as a "form of gathering," Biesta lays stress upon schools as places "where people come together" (BIESTA, 2017b, p. 419; 439) and this might help us to valorise the character of "togetherness" of CPIs, if only through a specific lens. Indeed, this does not mean emphasizing only an external feature of CPI but rather its intrinsic character: what happens (or, more cautiously, could or should happen) in CPI is a philosophizing-together as sumphilosophein. This expression comes from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (IX, 12, 1172, a 1-7), where it is introduced, not within the framework of a theoretical discussion, but as an instance of the activities that friends love to do together. In this Aristotelian passage the semantic texture is dominated by an existential-perceptual vocabulary not a theoretical-conceptual one: Aristotle speaks of the "sensitive perception of oneself" (peri auton d'ē aisthēsis) as something "desirable" (airetē), which finds its actuality (energheia) in the living with each other (suzēn). Then he mentions the sumphilosophein as one of the ways in which all this may be achieved. In this perspective, through a hermeneutical permutation, we can state that sumphilosophein is not only (or primarily) a merely intellectual adventure but a living together, thanks to which one may attain a sense of oneself, which, as an aisthēsis, is not merely the outcome of the unfolding of the agency of the subject,¹⁰ but is experienced (also) as a form of 'passibility' (Roth, 2011) - a being-affected by and through co-existence with the others.¹¹

I am not suggesting that the notion of sumphilosophein parallels the notion of existing in the world as a subject that Biesta (2017a) advocates; no fusion of horizons is invoked here. However, encountering the "resistance" of Biesta's misgivings about the 'verbalism' and 'conceptualism' of P4wC practices reminds us that P4wC should not be only (or predominantly) a merely intellectual enterprise, cultivating thinking skills, but (also and perhaps primarily) an existential event, in which children 'thoughtfully' live with friends (suzēn) by courtesy of whom they may undergo (rather than 'develop') the experience of sensing themselves.¹²

One could argue that, while inspiring, the Lingisian view risks being too dichotomous. However, here I am not interested in pointing to the possibly one-sided view of thinking-as-reason that underlies it, and, consequently, in reclaiming for CPI a status of thinking not 'infected' by the perils of the (rationalist) e-strangement implicit in Lingis' formulation. My strategy - in order to think with Biesta's ideas and not merely about them - has been rather that of letting the existential thrust of CPI emerge. As the "chronotope of sumphilosophein" (OLIVERIO, 2017) CPI is to be seen (also) in its experiential 'indexicality' and as a space of co-existence between friends, who are involved in thinking, understood not merely as an activity 'in the head' or an 'exercise of death,' but as one of the manners of being-together-in-the-world and enjoying friendship, 'aesthetically' sensing their presence with and to each other.

This argument should be complemented by one pivotal aspect: not only is P4wC to be construed as a "teaching movement" (BINGHAM, 2015; see also OLIVERIO [forthcoming/2018] for a more detailed discussion of this point), but the rediscovery of teaching in Biesta's terms could be conducive to an enriched way of looking at the role of the CPI 'facilitator' - all the more so in light of the interpretation advanced here of what doing philosophy together could mean. I would like to argue that the 'desirability' of that sense of oneself experienced through living-together in the form of the philosophizing-together requires a teacher who arouses in children a desire to exist in the world without being the centre of the world.¹³ However, an examination of this point would require a longer discussion than is possible here.

We could approach the argument developed thus far from yet another angle. Heidegger (2002, p. 31) wrote about the stranglehold of reason on education that occurred with the Platonic paideia, which has been the (often repressed) assumption of most educational reflection since. Biesta's educational thinking can be seen as an attempt to overturn this Platonic heritage by educationally deploying some notions inspired by Levinas. Asking educational questions from "outside" philosophy could be read, accordingly, as the endeavour to set education free from the imperialism of (theory-oriented) philosophy, which tends to dissolve education in its own discourse.

We should be ready to recognize that, if CPI is ultimately the space of an intellectual and verbal play with concepts, significant as all this is, it may be in jeopardy of a Platonic drift, in which education turns into merely education for reason/critical thinking by finally confirming the dissolution of the 'educationality' of education, understood as subjectification (BIESTA, 2010, 2014, 2017a). While CPI might (and even could) not be the most adequate setting for the task of education in the Biestan understanding of it, it is not doomed, however, to be a Lingisian rational community, providing that it is the site in which the "polemic commonality of philosophy and education" (OLIVERIO, forthcoming/2017) happens time and again. By this phrase I try both to capture a genealogical event, namely the emergence of philosophy and education as inseparable but distinct twins after the "philosophical-educational Big Bang" (OLIVERIO, forthcoming/2017) at the dawn of Western tradition, and to highlight the need not to Platonically dissolve the former into the latter, making education just an "offshoot" of philosophy (BIESTA, forthcoming/2017).

What I would like to claim is that the narrative of a "philosophical-educational Big Bang" is 'additional' to Lingis' and, to adopt Biesta's (2011, p. 307) aforementioned words, it "suggest[s] a perspective that can act as a reminder of a different way in which one can 'engage' with philosophy" within CPI, which offers a perspective different both from the imperialistic Platonic dissolution of education into philosophy (a tendency to which CPI as a merely rational community could very well capitulate) and from the Levinasian withdrawal from the emphasis on thinking.

I should specify once again that I am not presenting this as a synthesis, as if "the rational community" and "the other community" were aufgehoben in CPI so understood. More modestly, I am trying to think of ways of inhabiting CPI that reduce the risks of it turning into a rational community in which existence-in-the-world is bracketed and remains only 'in the head,' and in which education is just a function of philosophy. CPI can indeed become hospitable to experiences that "touch the soul" (BIESTA, 2017b, p. 432; 437), although I would not go so far as to say that CPI represents a privileged space in which these experiences can take place (a point magnificently made by Peter Shea [forthcoming/2018] in an essay which raises, from within the tradition of P4wC, some of the misgivings expressed by Biesta).

In this response I have assumed the possibility of a dialogue between P4wC and Biesta's educational thinking, and raised the question of what kind of dialogue it could be. I have excluded the possibility that this dialogue could lead to any "fusion of horizons," although I would tend to argue that there are some significant points of contact between the two educational stances in terms of 'themes,' of concerns about the contemporary dominant educational trends, and of the shared view that we should be committed to "making the practice and practicing of education itself more thoughtful" (BIESTA, 2017a, pos. 216). Moreover, I have endeavoured to verify this assumption - in an admittedly sketchy and only introductory way - by investigating what might represent a major bone of contention with Biesta, namely the intimate bond between philosophy and education, which is the very core of the P4wC approach and of its main educational 'device' (CPI).

Against this backdrop, I would like to suggest two ways in which we can frame the dialogue with Biesta, by capturing them in two phrases: 'parallel convergences' and 'bi-stable images.' The former is clearly an oxymoron, which gained an important meaning within the Italian political debate of the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁴ Independently from its historical origin, what strikes me in the phrase is the idea of a movement of converging that does not aim at any Aufhebung of the positions in a superior synthesis, because they are expected to remain, instead, in their 'face-to-face parallelism,' which only allows this kind of dialogue to continue to take place.

On the other hand, bi-stable images are those images - much studied by Gestaltpsychologie - in which the same sensorial stimulations are organized in two different figures (Gestalten) and the passing from one figure to the other (the Gestalt-switch) prevents one from being able to see the other one. In other words, either we see one figure or the other, because the perceptual structuration of the visual field impedes us from seeing the two contemporaneously.¹⁵

To return to my question: if we construe the dialogue with Biesta in terms of 'bi-stable images,' we recognize that there could be some commonalities in terms of themes, concerns and aspirations (i.e. the same sensorial stimulations of perceptual field) but we believe also that they are structured in such different educational stances (Gestalten) that a Gestalt-switch is necessary to see the alternative view. In that case it would be a matter of 'alternativeness' rather than 'additionality,' to appropriate Biesta's vocabulary. Judging from the title of Biesta's contribution to this issue of Childhood & Philosophy, this could be the way in which he might (sometimes) be inclined to interpret his dialogue with P4wC.¹⁶

Conversely, if we think in terms of "parallel convergences," by 'betting' upon the points of contact and encounter (in terms of themes, concerns and aspirations in reference to the dominant trends of contemporary educational scenarios), we might explore how we can 'indirectly' and 'additionally' contribute to each other in honing our conceptual and educational devices (convergences), by helping each other to see the common issues from another perspective, which will be all the more inspiring for the dialogue as long as it is not denied in its 'parallelism.'