From the art of thinking to the art of living
By Nicole Decostre
In this conference, I want to refer mainly to Matthew
Lipman. I am the translator in French of several of his books : Thinking in Education, De Boeck,
1995-2006-2011 ; Mark, Social Inquiry, Peter Lang, 2009 ; Lisa, Ethical Inquiry, Peter Lang,
2011 ; What Happens in Art, to
be published in Paris, Vrin, in 2016 ; and finally his Autobiography, moving and very
enlightening for which I have to find a publisher.
If
I wanted to begin with that, it is not to talk about me but because I want to
show that those books are still current, that they have to do with my subject
and that they are more necessary than ever.
It
seems to me that even if people speak more and more of P4C (it is in the air…),
they often go apart from the spirit of the program as conceived in Montclair by
Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp in the last quarter of the
twentieth century.
Of
course, the world has changed much and very interesting texts, better adapted,
written nowadays, give the opportunity to improve the thinking, keeping the
original spirit. The authors are frequently followers of Lipman, some trained
by him.
The
great interest of Lipman for me is that he has really built a program, made of
novels about everyday life, accompanied by manuals permitting to go deeper in
the concepts through the philosophical dialogue in the philosophical
community of inquiry. Those novels bring to life young people in their
everyday life and with their relationships with others (parents, teachers,
friends…). The philosophical problems belong to every person, everywhere in the
world and of all time (truth, justice, friendship, tolerance, good or evil,
knowledge, and so on). And their discussions aim to improve their way of
living.
Among
the fundamental questions that Lipman asks himself – and wants us to ask
ourselves – are : What sort of person do I want to become ? In what
world do I want to live ? What is a life worth of living ?
In this conference, we are invited to try, not to give ready solutions,
but to be able to recommend means permitting to the youth to live by
themselves, as autonomous as possible, so that they become able to bring their
contribution to promote peace, justice and freedom, hoping that they will be
able to collect the conditions of happiness.
What is important to do today for a peaceful world is
to try to understand others and to respect them. Appreciate diversity has to be
learned.
On the other hand, it has become a common word to say
that democracy is in great danger – if democracy ever has existed… Nor are the
human rights respected. Democracy begins within the family. The child usually
sees the adults, his parents in particular, as gods, behaving like a believer,
unable to disobey or to question their authority. It is often the reign of the
absolute, which is inherent to totalitarianism.
What about
the autonomy of the person, of that of the child who has become an adult ?
A large number of parents give themselves the right to
impose their beliefs, their convictions, their prejudices, their customs and
their traditions. They instill, they inculcate their own values.
Let us think to the problems of integrity of the body,
of the choice of marriage. (You might not know that Holland has recently
recognized the wedding of young girls married in their country of origin…). Let
us think of the choice of way of living. Let us think of the choice of
religion, which is a real problem nowadays.
And once
more, what about the most elementary rights ?
May we speak of « culture » in front of a
ghetto of prejudices, of intangible customs and of intellectual simplism ?
Let us not forget the modern technique, the invasion of robots, so
called intelligent and sensible.
Young people have a tendency to take virtual for real
and to believe that the actors they see on a screen live their own reality.
And now things go even further : in Belgium, for
instance, the pharmacy of the University of Liège (Lüttich) is about to use
robots for the medical prescriptions. These robots will prepare 6000
prescriptions daily ; by the way, the use of robots is not new in the
medical field : a small humanlike French-Belgian robot, called Zora, has
already been used for more than two years in hospitals, residences, specialized
school, in Belgium, in Holland, in France, in Switzerland ; if you arrive
at the Mariott hotel in Gent, you will be welcomed by Mario, a humanoid robot
who can speak 19 languages and can order a taxi for you !
As real as
natural ! Why should we be astonished that isolated elderly people tend to
humanize their mechanical servant ? Women have been seen knitting to
keep their companion warm. Moreover, some bomb techs consider their robots like
animals or human beings and are ready to die to save their lives. That is what
we call « artificial empathy ».
If
all that progress can be considered as a gift, it is a poisoned gift. If robots
can be really useful and if a lot of hope is placed in them, as it was the case
with Internet, they will create unexpected problems with disastrous consequences.
Only developing another way of thinking through education will reduce those
problems.
If robots can be our intimate confessors, they also
can be informers.
What about
private life then ?
Those robots are able to change the relationships
between human beings. Mobile phones have already made us intolerant to waiting.
Domestic robots might make us intolerant to contradiction.
Of course, I cannot explore the entire problem we are
confronted with as educators. I just wanted to propose you some examples. Let us
not be astonished to assist to fundamentalism, fanaticism, social or familial
atrocities. How could we be astonished of the difficulty to think and to live a
real citizenship ? I don’t speak of a citizenship of the right to vote,
but a chosen and reflected citizenship of a true dialogue, of a circumstantial
reality of the values, of possibility of evolution.
In
consequence, it is important to become conscious of all those problems for it
is high time to learn and to teach to think better, and to have a better
judgment.
We
understand now that if the problem of education has always existed, it has
become crucial.
Let us go back to my title, « From the Art of
Thinking to the Art of Living ». What is the relationship between the two,
between philosophy and a good way of life ?
Strong with its techno scientific power and its
economic supremacy, the West has a tendency to consider as universal its ideas
and values. Globalization makes that pretention stronger, while the
multiplication of the cultural exchanges should make us more careful. For
instance, our tendency to abstraction is far from being shared by all
civilizations and by all cultures.
Western
theology is far from the religious conceptions of Far East. Is monotheism not a
sort of abstraction of the divine ?
Let
us remember that, in the sixteenth century, missionaries trying to christianize
China and Japan encountered huge difficulties because the Japanese language was
not good for theological discussions : the adequate terms were missing.
In
China, the concept of a personal god was unknown and not possible to be
translated. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit who was a mathematician, forerunner of the
cultural exchanges between China and West, could overwhelm the cultural
obstacles, and assimilated the Chinese culture. He understood that China has no
religion and that Confucius never mentioned the almighty god, nor the life
after death, and he concludes that there is there no religion nor faith.
In A Philosophy of Living, the
French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien opposes to that tendency to
abstraction a concrete thinking, oriented to a better life. He finds that
orientation not only in the Chinese tradition, but also at the origins of our
own philosophy. He refers mainly to the philosopher Pierre Hadot who reminds us
of the somehow forgotten importance of the Greek-Roman wisdom. At that time, as
we know, philosophy was an art of living, a way of life.
In the beginning, the Greek philosophy had two tendencies : a
philosophy of the concept and a philosophy of a better way of living. But the
Platonic idealism, relayed by Plotin and by Christianity, won. For Hadot, that
art of living was confiscated by the theology in the thirteenth century. He
reminds us the great importance of the ways of life cultivated by Epicureanism
and by Stoicism with what he calls their « spiritual exercises ».
In
Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot
denounces the deviance of our philosophical system trying to take the text or
the word in an absolute sense. He finds in Meditations
of Marcus-Aurelius a living
thinking, which is near the human and the complexities and nuances of life. For
the stoic philosopher Marcus-Aurelius, the man has the duty not to embarrass
himself with what doesn’t depend on him (material goods, honors, opinions of
the others, and so on), but that he has to, on the contrary, become perfectly
master of his emotions, ideas, opinions and judgments, all things he is able to
master. His philosophy is strongly centered on the notion of duty and of responsibility.
Hadot
insists on the importance of the « spiritual exercises » included in
ancient wisdom (food, dialogue, meditation, contemplation), aiming to modify
the behavior of practitioners. He even discovers a therapeutic value in
philosophy, through dialogue that is a vivid relationship between persons
rather than abstract discourse about ideas.
The philosophical works of those times were not written to expose a
system, but rather to produce an effect of formation : the aim of the
philosopher was to exhort the minds of his readers or of his hearers so that
they would adopt a certain disposition of mind. If the Western philosophy
doesn’t totally ignore that way of acting, it remains dropout from Montaigne to
Wittgenstein, including some authors of aphorisms, like Schopenhauer or
Nietzsche.
All
those essays were of course judged confused or incoherent by the dominant
system of mind. For example, Epictetus often seems in his Discourses to defend contradictory attitudes. In fact, Epictetus
takes in account the realities of the life his disciples are going to live.
Similarly, Plutarch considers that practicing the everyday life of Socrates is
his real philosophy.
Through formation, dialogue, and talks about everyday life, are we not
near the practice of Matthew Lipman ? Is that not the substance of his
novels and the reason of the philosophical community of inquiry ?
Pierre Hadot expresses a profoundly pedagogical wish: the
philosophical discourse should renounce to take itself as an end or, worse, as
a way to show the eloquence of the philosopher, but should become a way to go
beyond oneself and have access to universal reasoning and to opening to the
others. With Lipman, we skip from discourse to teaching, but the aim is
similar. The political aim of Lipman is fundamentally democratic, caring of
human rights and of common good. He meets the care for discussion so precious
for Jorgen Habermas. He conceives pedagogy as a public service and his major
interest is the quality of the judgment. All this trigged in Lipman his
courageous initiative that was a total break with a paralyzing tradition.
Pierre
Hadot cites a sentence by Merleau-Ponty : « Philosophy consists to
re-learn to see the world. » This can lead, like in Kio et Gus « to wonder at the world», expression also used by
Wittgenstein or by a poet like Rilke.
The obsession of the clear, univocal definition, believing to seize the
real, and where it will be possible to construct a reasoning, out of reality
and with the simplifications that it implies, allows to question whether if the
Chinese, who didn’t think in terms of be but in terms of process hadn’t thought
in a better way the phenomenon of life. Similarly, the famous way, the Way, is
far of being a right and horizontal method, aiming the goal a priori
determined. Can we find in Lipman’s writings a unique definition ?
Nietzsche,
in Beyond Good and Evil, suggests to
go beyond those moral roots in a genealogy much more subtle and vivid than our
stereotyped and well fixed categories.
As to Gaston Bachelard, in The inductive Value of relativity, he follows the same way in
epistemology : the theoreticians would probably have more action if they
showed their thinking in its hesitations, in its defeats, in its errors, in its
hopes, rather than in the brilliant shine of a logical construction, closed on
itself and wearing the mark of its end.
Merleau-Ponty,
whose influence on Lipman is well known, wonders to which point philosophy is
the mastery of the sense. He asks himself the question to know if the term
« philosophy » belongs only to doctrines which can be translated into
concepts or if it can be extended to experiences, to wisdoms, to disciplines
which don’t reach that degree or that sort of conscience : here is the
real problem of the nature of the philosophical concept. The same with
Montaigne’s famous « What Do I Know? ». For the latter, live fully is
what is important. Lipman’s effort to reach the judgment best adapted to a
problem comes from a similar fumbling in the philosophical community of
inquiry.
A
German sinologist, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who lived in Germany of the
Enlightment, criticizes the rationalist tradition which, to him, is an obstacle
to our understanding of life.
Many people don’t think to their ethical life or to their way of living.
Conclusion
In which way can Lipman’s program of Philosophy for children can help us
to reach a better way of living » ?
The core of his pedagogy, the philosophical community of inquiry,
exploits systematically the search for an adequate solution to a problem,
carefully avoiding the spirit of system and the a priori, as well as a
conclusion which would make a rule dogmatically.
To take an example, Lisa, Ethical
Inquiry (as well as others of his novels) leads to social construction of
values and to the way to adapt to complex display of situations.
In the same way, the philosophical community of inquiry helps to build a
citizen mind through taking different contexts in examination thanks to Mark, Social Inquiry.
In the esthetic field, Lipman doesn’t defend a particular school or conception,
doesn’t take himself for an apostle of a particular theory of a system of
evaluation. In What Happens in Art, Lipman
shows us the balance between several factors interfering into the artistic
process. The more, the esthetical appreciation mixes with our pleasure and
happiness of living. The research for esthetic appreciation can develop the
critical thinking.
Matthew Lipman can be considered as a rehabilitator of wisdom. He is in
a way a teacher of an art of living where ethics plays a role so important in
the building of the “good judgment”, within a higher order of thinking whose
applications flourish in our daily life.
Matthew Lipman can be considered as a practical way to link universes as
different as the Chinese thinking or the Greek and Roman philosophy to the
complex contemporary life.
It is well known that students practicing P4C have better results in the
academic curriculum. And accustomed to communities of inquiry, they learn to
respect the other and to appreciate diversity; they acquire a critical,
creative and caring thinking as well as more empathy. And I am persuaded that
people – adults as well a young children – who have participated to
philosophical communities of inquiry have changed in their way of listening, of
seeing, of discussing, of relating with others. To practice philosophy has
changed their behavior as well as their way of living. The community of inquiry
is the place to live democracy instead of to be taught about it. It is also the
place where you are pushed to think of things you would never think of.
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