ניקול דקוסטרה היא המתרגמת מאנגלית לצרפתית של ספריו של פרופ' מתיו ליפמן שעוסקים בפילוסופיה עם ילדים.
Nicole Decostre is the translator of Prof. Matthew Lipman's books into French. Her article was presented at the ACPC conference (Graz, Austria, October 2013)
Introduction
Our society has become – and still becomes – more and
more cosmopolite. Which entails many important consequences, as well as cultural
social, political and individual. It also changes the type of interpersonal
relationships.
Cosmopolitanism, opposed to nationalism,
is often denigrated by it and also by the ideologies of identity.
First, what is nationalism?
nationalism /Cosmopolitanism
A. Here is the motto of nationalism: « one nation, one State ». The State is a
political entity, while the concept of nation refers to origin, race,
nationality, language, religion, and traditions.
Nationalism is not new: in History, those
who didn’t belong to any state have always been rejected: Gypsies, Jews and all
nomads in general.
Nationalism during the first half of the
nineteenth century was not directly a factor of exclusion. 1789 creates a
nation together with an ideology of universality. On the contrary, it has been
a factor of liberation for populations attributed without their consent to the
biggest European States at the sharing of Napoleon’s Empire in Vienna in 1815: new States were created in Central Zionism
arose at that time.
In the twentieth century, nationalism has
rejected all that doesn’t belong to a given State. It was at its paroxysm during
the Nazi period. There are still nationalists nowadays, but not so important,
in the extreme right-hand parties of all countries, particularly in the
ideologies of identity supporting a certain form of regionalism.
B. Cosmopolitanism is also not
new. It is very old. For Wikipedia, it is a concept created by Diogène de
Sinope, made of two Greek words, cosmos (world) and politès (citizen). It
expresses the possibility to be native of one place and to be able to touch
universality without loosing one’s specificity.
- In the
sixteenth century, Comenius was a cosmopolitan. He was in favour of a
cosmopolitan education and the edification of an international organisation of
public education.
- The eighteenth century developed the idea
of universality of the values in the name of the unity of mankind. 1789 creates a nation together with an ideology of
universality.
- The twentieth century developed the idea of World Citizenship
and of universalism. A World Citizen refuses any discrimination. Einstein
declared himself Citizen of the World (he found nationalism a childish disease)
and he supported Garry Levis, the first American citizen to declare himself World
Citizen. He was in favour of World Government.
- And today?
The facility of the world travels, the delocalisation
of enterprises and of people, the development of tourism all over the world, and
of course the progress of electronic means of communication have contributed to
develop cosmopolitanism.
Results of the globalisation
Results of that have been, among others,
the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the second one.
Cosmopolitanism represents a richness that
is at the same time ethical and cultural:
-
it corresponds to a sense of relativity of values and of systems compared to the terrorism of
the unique, of the absolute
-
ethically, it goes beyond exclusivism, egocentrism,
parental or national conditioning
-
it is open
to the other, to other values, to intellectual adventure, to an enlarged
thinking, to the civilizational dialogue, essential tool of peace and of
democracy
-
on a cultural
level, it enriches life through the meeting, the understanding and the
welcoming of other styles of life, of other ideas, other manifestations. A
cultural plurality is the beautiful
side of cosmopolitanism. It is interesting to note here that while
multiculturalism is only a juxtaposition of cultures, interculturalism makes
them collaborate. The first favours isolation, creation of ghettos, the second
one supposes deep relationships between cultures.
The cultural plurality:
o
entails respect
and esteem for others
o
perfects our vision and our understanding of the
world and of Humanity
o
constitutes a strong factor of peace, of happiness, of
harmony in the living together
o
facilitates our eventual insertion in a different
society and constitutes an excellent preparation to the journey.
I must add that:
-
As most of the social groups press their members to make them respect
the norms and traditions of their group, it entails problems when facing cosmopolitanism.
-
Anomy can happen when an entire
society or a social group begins to desintegrate, or if one person feels
excluded from the group he or she belongs to.
What about
school?
Does education adapt itself to the movement? It seems
to be the contrary… School doesn’t serve its traditional pedagogical purpose.
Teachers are overwhelmed, teens and children are bored, play up, drop out of
school. What is the place given to the relationship to the student, to his or
her own experience? Has a class nowadays the right or the permission to make
research, to exercise a critical thinking?
Does school care for:
-
free thinking?
-
sense to give to the world?
-
Its responsibility
and its limits?
-
A global
and updated knowledge?
-
questioning and philosophical dialogue?
Now, the societal change, particularly
globalisation, needs absolutely a good judgment.
Here I refer to Matthew Lipman and his program of Philosophy for Children (P4C), which
seems to me very useful, in any country or any continent, as well as in any
occasion, to discuss philosophical or ethical problems. It seems still more
important to treat of that vast change of society. And not only of those
societies that are threatened by exclusion: globalisation touches every
country, every person, directly or indirectly (some societies are even
threatened of disappearance, for example in Amazonia).
Matthew Lipman
As many of you know, you can find his theory of
education in Thinking in Education (one
of his books I translated).
For Lipman, a higher
order thinking is a thinking which is at the same time critical, creative and caring. Conditions to attain a good
judgment.
The “good” judgment
What is for Lipman a good judgment?
- It takes in
account everything concerning it, even itself
- It is efficient only if it rests upon real thinking skills: infer, compare,
question, inquire, hypothesize, conceptualize, translate, find analogies, and
so on
- It involves self-correction,
which permits to discover one’s own weaknesses
and to correct one’s errors.
- It cares for the context:
for example for the particularisms, or for what makes a situation unique
- It is hostile to any stereotype, to any prejudice
- It must take in account the difficulty to translate a sense from a given context
to another, or from a language to another.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY
The philosophical community of inquiry,
main tool of Matthew Lipman, is excellent to develop the sense of an
intelligent and ethical cosmopolitanism, based on democratic principles and on
ethical values.
N.B.
- Attention not to confuse a community of
inquiry with simple communities of scholars.
- Let’s not confuse also the CI with an
apprenticeship in-group.
specificity of the ci
•
Reasoning : it
develops skills and habits of the mind
•
Knowledge : it helps
to extend it, to defend it, to coordinate it
•
Search for truth and
its processes
•
Aims at practical
results
DIALOGUE
The philosophical dialogue characterizes the
philosophical community of inquiry.
What are the differences between conversations and
discussions? Between conversations and dialogues? Between conversations and debates?
What is the relationship between conversation and communication? All these questions
have to be analyzed in the CI.
Dialogue is not absolutely without any intention. It
can contain persuasive arguments. But, contrarily to the conversation, it
constitutes a form of inquiry. For
example, to declare that things are different requires inquiring about what
makes a distinction between them.
In a dialogue, every argument can provoke a counter-argument, which goes beyond the
other.
What is the
specificity of the philosophical dialogue?
Nearly everything can be the subject of such a
dialogue. In fact, it is easier to say what it is not than what it is.
The problem is to recognize the philosophical
questions and to identify the ones that are sufficiently important to merit an
inquiry.
Many teachers use techniques of care without any
philosophical perspective.
For example, when this sort of question arises: why do
some people exclude others? Or: What does a person feel if she or he is
excluded (or thinks she or he is)? Those questions are more concerned by
psychology and miss a philosophical analysis. After such a question, children
will of course answer that it is bad to exclude (message that the teacher wants
to inculcate…). And at the same time, those who exclude will have a feeling of
culpability, thus bad opinion of themselves. What is important here is rather
to make the persons become aware of that sort of behaviour to become able to
control it. Of course, if the philosophical discussion about that can begin
with an empathic exchange of roles, it has to go further, to perceive in the
long term the implications and the ramifications.
One of the objectives of a philosophical community of
inquiry is to determine to where a group can encourage creativity of its
members, even if the individualistic expressions can constitute a danger for
the unity of the group.
Moreover, those who rebel against the customs and the
traditions can probably understand that the group is perhaps attached to them
only by need of self-protection.
Meeting the other
The true dialogue
allows the I to meet the you, as Martin Buber says in I and Thou (1935). For him, that meeting has nothing to do with
empathy, which he considers as a loss of one’s specificity by that projection
in the other while dialogue enlarges the I. Dialogue rests on reciprocity and
responsibility. That meeting of the other particularly interested Ann Sharp. She
writes in one of her articles that a hard lesson to draw from contemporary
History with its innumerable losses of human lives in wars absolutely not necessary,
is that you cannot imagine what is good for others, who are different, if you
don’t know what they think good for
themselves. For Hannah Arendt, to really understand what a person thinks, it is also necessary to understand how she or he thinks.
Thus, the philosophical community of inquiry:
o
Calls for imagination combining
critical thinking, creative thinking and caring thinking. That is to create
links between the different points of view, to understand the feelings of
people whose views on the world come from their own context, to have empathy towards
them while remaining themselves and using one’s critical skills to be able to
arrive to a judgment. The participants are guided by criteria.
o
Suppose – and Lipman is much interested by the language and its apprenticeship – that the interlocutors can tell
their own story and express their point of view. It means that they have to
master a common language and also that they have a place to do all that. That
place has to be sure, without ridiculous and without blame, where the
cooperation replaces the competition. It is an ideal place to cultivate
reasonableness, a positive affective life, and even an aesthetic sense, in a
stimulating atmosphere.
o
Through reasonable discussions, the participants learn to appreciate
their intellectual interdependency.
o
The philosophical community of inquiry represents a modern form of democracy: the participants coming from
different horizons, with their different interests and attitudes become
partners and can express themselves freely.
o
The philosophical community of inquiry has its own methodology:
reading, questioning, discussion.
o
The material used: novels
and manuals made by Lipman and
his team for the students, even for children of 3rd Kindergarten.
The novels modelize several ways of thinking and of situations. New material is
also conceived in the same spirit. And of course it is possible to practise
that methodology with stories of participants about their own experience, or with a TV broadcast, with the visit of an exhibition
or even with a conference by a specialist. That material proposes very
interesting exercises for that problem of a cosmopolitical education. For example,
exercises on traditions, on exclusion and inclusion, on classification, on building
one’s identity, on apprenticeship by the entourage. And so on.
o
The philosophical community of inquiry develops skills and habits of the mind:
questioning, research, respect for the other participants, empathetic listening,
courage of one’s opinions, curiosity, and so on.
o
The philosophical community of inquiry helps to go deeper in dialogue and argumentation.
Conclusion on the
philosophical dialogue in a CI
- It educates the emotions
- Sharpens the thinking, the language skills
- Is far from beliefs,
convictions and prejudices. It is the place to discuss about the necessity - or
not - to revise a conviction, to
adapt it to new circumstances. Or to discuss of traditions that may impeach
progress or adaptation to new situations created by cosmopolitanism.
- Empathy and transparency
exist in that sort of community
- It has a role at the same
time social and cognitive
- It aims to practical
results
- Those pacific confrontations of ideas for the purpose
of progress constitute at the same time applied free thinking and an experience
of concrete democracy where the young people, conscious of their own roots,
will learn to socialize themselves.
- Children discover that they can use the experience of others and even
benefit of it.
- And in the case we are treating, the objective is to learn about other
societies and to be able at the same time to reflect upon that new knowledge.
Conclusion on the CI
•
Living democracy
•
Open
epistemology, openness to other cultures
•
Equality of chances
•
Variation of contributions
•
Shared
ethical values
•
Apprenticeship
easier
•
Cooperation
instead
of competition
•
Deeper
argumentation
What are the obstacles to a sound vision of
cosmopolitanism?
-
Stereotypes. Thanks to the
philosophical community of inquiry, if they don’t disappear totally, they loose
power.
-
Mistrust towards others can be annihilated.
-
Openness to other cultures is facilitated.
However, we live nowadays a paradox: globalization concerns all domains and is effective. But
it genders to some people a fear and an identitarian closure, even a tribal
one. This is another reason to use the philosophical community of inquiry to
try to counter that political (populism) and cultural danger.
Moreover, in a community of inquiry of teens of 14-17,
it is important to verify if they possess enough knowledge in geopolitics to be able to understand
internationalism and its stakes.
CONCLUSION
The proof exists through many experiences and
evaluations that the program of Philosophy
for Children can help school to get out of the difficulties. The remarkable work of Matthew Lipman is a humanist one. Of course, it is
not protected from manipulations or of clumsiness’s.
Lipman is deeply pacifist, deeply democrat. We can
find nowhere a direct defence of peace or an open critic of violence as main
subjects. A violent act can be a good opportunity in a class for a reasonable
dialogue, not precisely about the act itself, but about the context, the
reasons – good or bad – that can have provoked it. It is not necessary to get
interested directly to the concept of peace to engage oneself in education for
peace. Nowhere can we find discussions about those subjects that preoccupy so
much the adults today: drugs, use of TV or of Internet, and others.
No discussion about cosmopolitanism. Exercises in the manuals can be used
to treat it: for example, in Lisa,
Ethical Inquiry, Lipman suggests to the teachers that they ask their
students what a community of inquiry could consider as intangible and which
traditions it would favour. Or what is the difference between traditions and
institutions. Why the concept of community corresponds to that of inquiry. Or
if a modern society can constitute a community. Or if they think that a world community
respecting diversity can exist. Young people
have to become able to make their own opinions about all that and, in
consequence, to act.
What Lipman does is a deep work on the bases of the thinking. He has no
system.
Let us hope that such a vision
of education will become rooted more and more! If P4C has acquired certain
recognition, it is thanks to people who are convinced and engaged in
educational experiences in various contexts, in the translation of the material
and in the elaboration of new material.
Our democracy needs absolutely
an enhancement of conscience and of over wareness. Can the
philosophical community of inquiry not be a good means to help in this sense? I
think it is the moment to ask the two questions of Matthew Lipman: “In what
sort of world do I want to live?” And “What sort of person do I want to be?”
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