Introduction: Philosophy, Education and the Care of the Self

Abstract

The papers collected in this special issue of Thinking were presented at the Group Meeting of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Philosophy Association, Eastern Division, in December 2009 in Manhattan. The theme of that session, to which these authors responded, was “Philosophy, Education and the Care of the Self.” Our aim in constructing this theme was to bring together two areas of scholarship, to which, we believe, Philosophy for Children has much to contribute, and from which it has much to learn. The first area of scholarship we might refer to as ‘Philosophy as the Care of the Self,’ or ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life.’ Scholars working in this field practice and promote philosophy as a category of disciplines for ethical, aesthetic and psychological or spiritual self-transformation. This tradition begins with philosophers of Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese antiquity, for whom the wisdom or sophia that philosophy pursues is not knowledge but a well-lived life. Richard Shusterman, for example, recommends “the idea of philosophy as a deliberative life-practice that brings lives of beauty and happiness to its practitioners,” and observes that “philosophy’s solutions to life’s riddles are not propositional knowledge but transformational practice” (1997, 25). Certain kinds of knowledge and understanding are, of course, necessary for this pursuit, but are not sufficient, because to truly live well – e.g., with purpose, integrity, equanimity and compassion – requires self-transformation through physical, intellectual and psychological exercise. As Martha Nussbaum explains, many of the ancients employed a medical analogy, describing philosophy as a set of therapeutic or curative practices for various diseases or afflictions of the soul. In this tradition, a philo-sopher is anyone who is engaged in self-confrontation and self-work, and need not be a scholar. Early accounts of philosophy as a way of life describe whole ways of life that included habits of diet and exercise, the discipline of desire, and the cultivation of worthy passions, meaningful friendships, helpful attitudes toward death, and many other aspects of caring for the self, the community, the stranger and the natural world. Scholarship in the form of theoretical discourse may help to explain and justify such ways of life, and certain forms of scholarly discipline – those that decenter the ego for the sake of reasonableness, fairness to others and truth – are themselves self-transformative practices. But as Socrates so tirelessly cautioned, discourse – even highlydisciplined, scholarly discourse – can also be a distraction from self-work, and even detrimental to it, e.g. when it becomes a means to self-aggrandizement. Jacob Needleman has observed that in both of Western culture’s originary traditions – Judaism and “Hellenic spiritual philosophy” – the ideal of reason was understood not merely as instrumentalist rationality freed from the passions, but as intellectual activity that combined such thinking with perceptive, intuitive and valuing capacities oriented to the real and the good (2002, 48). For this reason, philosophers in this tradition have, for centuries, disparaged philosophers whose work is merely academic – who, as Seneca put it, “turn love of wisdom (philosophia) into love of words (philologia)” (quoted in Hadot 2002, 174). In addition, they have advocated practical, somatic and contemplative exercises to accompany the cognitive practices of argumentation and conceptual analysis, as central to philosophy’s purpose. One of the most important characteristics of philosophy practiced as the care of the self is that this practice can only begin from a genuine sense of self-discontentedness. This sense may derive from a more general sense of dissatisfaction, world weariness or suffering, but must, at some point, develop into an existential recognition of one’s own moral disorientation, spiritual aporia, or, at the very least, of one’s philosophical ignorance. So Socrates admonishes Alcibiades in this exchange: