Chapter 13:

Why should you learn to think philosophically?

Before I go on to treat in more detail that special form of discussion that I introduced in the previous chapter, I should address a rather old elephant that I have just introduced into the room now. His name is “Philosophy”.

Since this form of discussion that I am proposing should have a prominent place in educational activity is philosophical, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to square up, firstly, to the depth of popular prejudice that exists against philosophy, and some of the ignorance and misconceptions about it.

Among the ways in which philosophy is quickly dismissed as unworthy of any serious consideration for practical people is, for instance, the way that we make a joke about trying to find the meaning of life – something that we suspect that philosophers worry about, and something that we know to be absolutely futile, like spending one’s life in a dark basement amid all those fumes trying to turn lead into gold. Life is to be lived! Get over it! Get on with it! You won’t get anywhere troubling about its meaning!  Just get a life! Don’t over-think it!

Anyone who thinks that this joke conveys a serious point about philosophy needs to get out more themselves. To think that it is futile to ask questions about the meaning of life isn’t to be practical about life at all. It doesn’t mean that your feet are on the solid ground. It is to hide from life, and to trust to luck in a way that renders it very fragile, because to dismiss the problem of the meaning of life is to side with its meaninglessness. That only seems to work when life is congenial. Try it when life is going wrong, and stays wrong; when it starts to wear you down and the future looks worse with no prospect of improvement. Sure. Get over it.

Those who think this really do need more vivid experience of those many actual people whose lives have come to lack much meaning. Try living such a life, if it can be called “living”. These lives aren’t some philosophical conjuring trick, and treating them as a joke is, itself, pitiable.

Meaningless lives are, indeed, far too numerous, and quite undeserving of cavalier treatment. There are people who are doing little more than waiting life out. We have gone so far as to  invent things called “pass-times”, to help them. Indeed there are even people for whom the prospect of death doesn’t mean the end of something more than just bearable, let alone fulfilling – their problem of life is how to get through the time until death arrives.

We may view many of these cases as some sort of psychological disease, though they are also likely to be socially conditioned. Either way, their roots are philosophical. This is a problem that is not even unknown to schooling, given the rates of teenage suicide, but schools, not being educational, have no real way of addressing it. Like many other institutions, schools often think issues that are really educational issues are best addressed with therapy.

My university courses in philosophy of education were quite popular. I could always grow them, even when courses in the Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences were declining. But I had long since taken the advice of my departmental colleagues, and made quite sure that the word “philosophy” never appeared in the titles or the initial descriptions. I certainly did try to explain what the courses were about, of course.

I recall one student who was not untypical. She told me that, had she known it was a course in philosophy, she would never have taken it. She wasn’t at all philosophical, she said. She just wasn’t a deep or abstract thinker. I felt that my deep, dark deceptiveness had caught up with me at last. I fumbled for what to say. Perhaps an apology of some sort? No, no, she said. I am really loving it. That explained the big grin and the sparkle in her eyes, which had me rather confused.

Philosophy is just about as easy or as hard as you want to make it. In order to understand this, we need to distinguish between learning to do philosophy, and learning about philosophy. Learning to do philosophy is relatively easy. The Philosophy for Children movement has shown that six-year-olds can learn to do it remarkably well.

Learn the appropriate social skills in a group setting, master some core philosophical moves or techniques and then, with a like-minded, sympathetic, sensitive and courageous group, ask some suitable questions and get on with it. This is the core educational process, and there is something important here about the way in which the birth of the idea of education was bound up, at the same moment, with the birth of philosophy. The connection is not at all coincidental.

It is certainly true that, as you want to understand philosophy better, and penetrate further into key issues that come up again and again, all kinds of progress eventually comes to be powered more and more by the great proposals and counter proposals that have been made over thousands of years. The reading of the originals and the surrounding scholarship can be hard. The thought of people like Plato and Aristotle, Hume, Wittgenstein or Dewey tend to be layered, historical context (and their personal history) matters and a life-time could be spent specializing in even one of them. Moving in this direction also requires and develops technical skill. Explaining difficult things in writing can make for difficult reading, and this, in turn, often requires considerable incentive to persist.

But to be truly useful, you don’t want to head down this path unless you have already acquired personal philosophical reasons for wanting to do so, and a real concern for the philosophical issues that plague human knowledge and action and decision. Indeed you probably don’t want to do it unless you have come to love philosophy, and almost can’t help yourself. But by then, doing it won’t seem so hard after all.

Philosophy can be a trap, too, which is why it is important to get to your enthusiasm for it in the right way. It is indeed easy for philosophy to become abstracted from life, and people can pursue it as a substitute for engaging in life. It can be the great escape. Some people enjoy that, and seek the technical game that aspects of it can become, and the dangerous intellectual comfort and even smugness that lies in a self-perception of “being rational”.

Intellectual stimulation can become addictive, and philosophy can be a fix. That can be fair enough too, of course. Each to their own. But it is not how philosophy wins its core place in educational content, or in the practical affairs of life, and it is not the alchemy that will get most of us going.

Philosophical decisions and conclusions lie

everywhere in our thought and action: for good and for ill

One of my professors used to say that nobody has a choice as to whether or not to do philosophy; they only have the choice as to whether to do it well or badly. This is because philosophy has to do with the tools and structures of our thinking – the concepts, the assumptions, the perceptions, the values, the points of view into which they are assembled and that we use to make decisions and which lie behind our feelings and passions.

Our ideas, our understandings, our choices and decisions are likely to reflect the quality of our tools. Poor workmen may blame their tools, but good workmen care for them. They treat them with respect.  When we simply depend on the clichés and platitudes, the everyday conventional wisdom, even the stuff we are taught as authoritative in schools, we have little charge over our own tools, little ability to tell whether they are sharp or blunt, little ability to sharpen them if they are blunt, and little ability even to tell whether they are remotely appropriate to our particular needs. Are the things we are taught or told true? Reliable? Important? Useful? To us? What should we make of them? What is the value of our own experience, our own thoughts?

We are at the total mercy of our teachers, trusting – usually unwisely, that they had the right tools and that they used them effectively. Without an ability to clean ourselves up and ensure that we are using the best tools in the right way, and being able to check that out for ourselves, we spend most of our time blundering around vaguely and ineffectively; depending unwisely and asserting our intellectual independence unwisely, either of which are likely to issue in unwise decisions. We are not really in charge of our own minds. We may as well be trying to garden with a club. Our approach to education itself is a classic example.

Let us look at these tools and structures a little more closely. Among other things, philosophers work on concepts – roughly . . . the words we use and think with, and what they mean. That may not seem to amount to much when we try to puzzle over the word “table”, but the stakes start to rise when we wonder about friendship, or promising, or loyalty, or what we owe to another person or ourselves, or whether we have been betrayed, or whether we should forgive, or . . .  what it might mean to respect ourselves. Concepts are crucial to what we see, to what we take for granted, to how we interpret what is happening.

Beliefs are formed out of concepts. They predict, they explain, they justify. We often make statements about them. “It is bad to eat sugar”. But just saying the words masks something about them. Beliefs and concepts are textured with value. They are riddled through with levels of conviction or certainty, or doubt, and dosed up with what matters.

That lion charging us – the world is suddenly brimming with judgements about what it all means – about what lions are, about what they are likely to do to us when they reach us, and whether that matters. Concepts plus conviction about their appropriate application, plus value equals feeling – from security and stability to gentle sensibilities to raging passion to debilitating anxiety. Getting the concepts, the conviction, the value right – doing it well – are profoundly implicated in the possibilities of perceiving well, of deciding well, of acting well, or experiencing well, of living well.

Back in chapter 4, I suggested that a life-plan wasn’t just something that we populated with aspirations and activities to satisfy our wants and desires – or that other people might appreciate seeing what we do. It also includes a whole framework or frameworks that give sense to the developments of our wants and desires, and also of our character. I characterised these in terms of an outlook on life, and settled points of view or views we come to hold on our world and ourselves. These represent a fabric of convictions, assumptions and values that give some preliminary ordering to our priorities and our reasons. They serve as filters.

Much in life is resolved and settled in these background structures, allowing us to build habits, including habits of mind, that free our attention and our thought to other things we deem worthy of it. How all of this structure is built, and how well it is built, shapes everything that we attend to in life and how we attend to it, from wants and desires, to reasons, to excuses.

This outlook on life is as critical to life-planning as any activities or undertakings we choose to put into it. Everyone has one of these outlooks on life, and it is hard to deny that a good many of them could do with some serious work. Everyone incarcerated in every high security prison has an outlook on life. So do all those people out in the community who live lives of “quiet desperation”.

To work on our outlook on life; to examine it and develop it critically and with skill; to do real work on it so that we can take responsibility for ourselves, is to do philosophy. It is to build a philosophy of life, and really do it. This is quite different from the end of any sentence that begins “my philosophy is . . .”, which is usually just a rule-of-thumb that I try to follow.

To work with these things, we need to be able to ask fundamental questions that aren’t so much the questions of everyday life, and to reason about these questions and with them, and about the structures of assumptions and value that we use to order our lives and make sense of them, and about the reasons themselves. So philosophy is about good reasoning – about deciding good reasons from bad, about deciding what sorts of reasons should outweigh others, about the standards that reasoning should meet, and about where and when to deploy what sorts of reasons.

As the field that deals with the nature of good reasoning, and that attempts most self-consciously to do it, philosophy is the go-to field for developing critical thinking. New Zealand schools are required to develop critical thinking, but it is just one of those fluffy aims that no-one ever does anything about – partly because they have so little knowledge of it.

It is as if all of us teachers just develop critical thinking naturally, in the course of everything else that we do . . . apparently. Perhaps Just being near a teacher is to absorb the critical thinking abilities they all “naturally” and automatically seem assumed to possess. They are so good at it they just can’t help themselves. That’s why they don’t need to learn anything about it . . . apparently.

A responsibility to philosophy falls on each one of us

If you have understood what I have been saying about philosophy being about the tools of our thinking, it will have begun to dawn on you that every human activity has a philosophical dimension – the concepts, the ideas, the judgments that define it, the forms of reasoning that guide it and render it coherent.

I am a fly fisherman. Fly fishing is riddled with philosophical debates, and becoming a fly fisherman is riddled with philosophical decisions. So is cooking. This is why we never have any choice as to whether or not to do philosophy, and the failure to do it well is often a reason the activity fails, or goes astray.

Every academic discipline has its philosophical end, and some of these are explicitly recognized as fields of philosophy – philosophy of science, mathematics, law, history and religion, social philosophy and social theory, philosophical psychology and the philosophy of mind, philosophy of art, literature and aesthetics. Medical ethics. Philosophy of management. Philosophy of education.

Many practitioners in some of these fields are fundamentally confused about the role of philosophy in their own field. It is common, for instance, to have it pointed out that science was once a part of philosophy, but when proper empirical methods were developed, it was able to “break away” and “stand on its own feet”.

As the social sciences developed empirical methods, they too “won their independence”. This leads to one of those tragic misunderstandings that underpins many of the interdisciplinary wars that have been getting worse with increasing specialization, and the loss of a broad liberal education. When science broke away, it raided the treasure chest first. It took some of philosophy with it. Inevitably, it has its own philosophical questions, and it is only as good as its ability to address them.

Three things are crucial to science – that its methodologies are sound, that it is empirical, or based on controlled, replicable experience, and that it is theory-driven. Its distinctive methodologies, of course, are data driven. Observations, measurement and the integrity of data are what defines it as empirical, and its methodologies have to be designed to establish and meet standard of data-gathering.

This emphasis on data allows it to be separated from the rest of philosophical tradition. Data are used to test ideas. But equally, it is idea driven, The data has to be conceptualized, and it has to be interpreted through theories that attempt to explain and predict. All of that theory and all of the methodology have to be established and maintained philosophically. So too do the questions, the problems that are to be pursued. Why does this thing we are trying to understand through science matter? Why this specific understanding? The answers to these questions often go back to the theories, but how are theories built? There can be even more fundamental questions that are philosophical with a practical bite. Why should enormous funding be provided to do this stuff?

Unfortunately for science’s own self-understanding, specialization reduces an appreciation of its own philosophical character. Some scientists, like Einstein, never worked or work at the data-gathering end. Their work is conceptual. Others never leave the lab, and work a long way inside the frameworks of science already established by their community. Training about science – its history, philosophy or social context, is far from obligatory for scientists – and rare. This is a recipe for impoverished self-understanding and for interdisciplinary scorn. Really good scientists who really do understand their fields also have intellectual breadth.

Given this lack of self-understanding, we are entitled to put our minds on red-alert whenever a scientist says (as they so often do) “I am a scientist; so I believe . . .”. What we are about to hear are the rules of thumb, the doctrines, the articles of faith, not a careful appreciation of the unique powers and limitations of science. The  glaring similarities between such statements and “I am a catholic, – or Buddhist, or Muslim – so I believe . . .” should be obvious. The claims are going to be doctrinal.

The problems of this lack of awareness of the philosophical task are particularly vivid throughout psychology – the social science discipline which has been most ardent in its attempts to emulate a model of physical science. Psychology is rife with studies pursued with great technical sophistication after poorly conceived questions, impoverished theories and crudely analysed concepts. The result has been, and continues to be, great wastage of resources and much confusion when it comes to the value of applying its “knowledge”.

This is directly attributable to its scorn and neglect of philosophy – both in its own practice and in the difficult pursuit of the field of philosophy of mind. Occasionally, though, and standing out above the rest, are psychologists who take their philosophical sophistication seriously.

So much of this inter-disciplinary misunderstanding, and the squabbles that result, would be less of the problem that they are if philosophy was treated seriously in education. But education pays a much larger price for this misunderstanding of philosophy than the flawed thinking and the interdisciplinary scorn that is rife in academia. Philosophy is important to all of our learning, and not just what academics study.

In contrast to what a thoughtful person might reflect upon in order to live life well, academic philosophy is very narrow in scope. It can get highly technical – beyond what we require as individuals to negotiate life. It deals with well-known perennial issues, and issues that are fundamental to various fields of inquiry.

Issues underlying our moral and political superstructures and the deep background of science and language are much more central to professional philosophy than the issues and decisions that we might face in working out our lives. Even when it does address these, it tends to address cases and examples that might shed light on much larger theories. But the devil, in our lives, lives in the much finer details.

The absence of a seriousness about philosophy in our schooling makes it difficult for us to discover the importance of philosophy in all our lives, if we are to live them well. Schooling leaves us intellectually dependent. I have already suggested one consequence of this. Subliminally, because of our dependence, schooling encourages the belief that, if something was important, “they” would have told us. I have suggested that this is a reason that it never really occurs to us that we should all have a serious knowledge of education. If there had been anything worth knowing about education, “they” would have told us.

It is the same with philosophy. If philosophy was at all important to our lives, “they” surely would have let us know. Philosophy must therefore be abstract, irrelevant, and a good pastime for peculiar, pointy-headed people. That is why we are confident in its uselessness and irrelevance. The significance of the fact that, just like educational understanding, philosophy is not something we would dare to teach our slaves, just never seriously occurs to us.

Why is philosophy so important to all of us, just in living our lives well? If, as I have tried to show, there is a philosophical aspect to all our activities, and if it makes a difference to the effectiveness of our activities whether it is done well or badly, then philosophy is important to our everyday living. Even more importantly, if philosophy is important to our intellectual independence, then it is crucial to our ability to make up our minds and our lives for ourselves.

If we wanted people to grow up knowing how to live, knowing how to make something of life for themselves, then we would place philosophy right at the centre. Philosophy draws us to the big picture, and forces us to think outside the box. The box is always conventional thought. Philosophy is the art of thinking outside it.

The examined and well-considered life requires that we think effectively about it, that our tools of thought are sharp, and that they are worked on the very subject matter of living. Philosophers and thinkers have known about this for thousands of years. Sometimes ecclesiastical or political authorities have tried to subjugate this insight – to suppress it. The most perennial doubt about it, though, has been that only a few people were capable of it. The masses weren’t up to it. They needed to be taught what to think.

In our time this fallacy should be overturned by two basic modern insights. The first is that every single person is bound to decide their own lives for themselves, within the limits of collective cooperation. This duty isn’t just restricted to highly intellectual, or supposedly smart people – it is something that all people are expected to do.

This creates a responsibility on us all to figure out how they – and we – can learn to do that – learn to think out our lives for ourselves, for we cannot take personal responsibility for them otherwise. Ever since the Enlightenment, our acceptance of a requirement of self-determination has meant that, to be consistent, philosophy must be at the centre of education. In order to take that self-determination seriously, we all must engage in it. The Enlightenment was a philosophical revolution in our thought and our duties, but also in our intellectual requirements.

The second insight has been provided by the Philosophy for Children movement, which has shown that most people can learn to do it – that even young children can learn to do it well at their own level – and they enjoy it. There is no longer any justification for thinking that philosophy must be limited to so-called “smart” people. Since everyone is required to be self-determining, everyone must be equipped to perform the task to the best of their ability, and this is what excellence should be about, before it is about anything else.

Certainty, doubt and “letting go”

One problem that gets in the way of proper philosophical development arises because of our attitudes to certainty, confusion and doubt. Good philosophy requires a lot of careful questioning, and questioning involves cultivating uncertainty and doubt. Schooling, though, turns doubt and confusion into problems.

If I am in doubt, or uncertain, how can I expect to answer the questions? How will I complete the assessment? Surely all that testing and examining is to show that we have learned the right answers. We are encouraged to voice our doubts, but almost exclusively to get clarification from the teacher. I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me please (or explain it again)? It is the teacher’s job to have the ready answers. Putting the questions back on to us just raises our anxiety. Teachers aren’t doing their job. Yet uncertainty and doubt are the motive for true inquiry, and confusion is essential to real progress and growth.

This problem goes much deeper than simply the miseducative condition of our schools. It lies deep in our history.

John Dewey called the problem the “Quest for Certainty”. (QfC) It can be traced back to Plato. Its more recent manifestation that has made it more acute has, I think, a religious twist to it that comes from the replacement of religious authority with the Enlightenment confidence in reason, and because of this I feel justified in describing it as a form of “rational fundamentalism”.

It has also been described in terms of our modern obsession with controlling life far beyond the realistic limits of practical control, which again reflects a decline in religious certainty. It manifests itself in the hubris of modern scientism and the extravagant claims that are made for it and in our preoccupation with the many dubious wonders of technology. Studies show.

That neediness for getting the answers which is cultivated by conventional schooling firstly invests certainty in the knowledge of teachers and secondly in the knowledge of curriculum planners and the writers of textbooks who have the answers.  It is our job to receive them or guess them.

The assumption is that there are those who really do know – remote inhabitants of an arcane world interpreted for us by the lower priesthood of our teachers who are our vivid representatives of the third level of the higher priesthood; scholars and scientific researchers. We feel uncomfortable with uncertainty and confusion – these are a sort of disease that needs to be dispelled. They are signs of our much more frail human weakness. That the expectation of the right answer persists so firmly into university, and continues to be cultivated there, is a symptom of this need for certainty.

At the same time, we recoil at the cold, dead, heavy hand of the rational and of Reason, of logic at the expense of emotion and feeling. Spock, in Star Trek, was at least half human. We encourage people to listen to their intuition, their hearts, rather than to get there by calculation. Reason, though useful to our planning, can seem cold and soulless and without humour or playfulness. No wonder most of us don’t want to live with it.

Yet I may have been read – even by many – as calling for just this throughout this book. I have advocated critical thinking, reflection on experience, disciplined discussion and inquiry, and even philosophy. Isn’t this just a call for cold, dead, abstract calculation? To misunderstand my proposals in this way would be for you to bring a fault of intellectual history to your reading of them – to drag in the dead weight of rational fundamentalism.

One aspect of this obsessiveness with control, of this quest for certainty, arises from industrialization and the advance of capitalism. These developments saw the expansion of merchant and then industrial classes encroaching on the power of the landed aristocracy. The deep political changes in the nature of sovereignty and political and religious authority were heavily influenced by the power struggles involved.

New classes of people were emerging, and these classes, dedicated to production and trade, and with the wonders of industrial invention on their side, were inevitably very materialistic in their pursuit of their good.  They displayed their status through their consumption of the goods of trade and production. The shift in ethos of such classes was, as a result, away from piety or fame and honour through feats of arms – pursuits and accomplishments that transcended death – and towards material acquisitions that you can’t take with you.

It has long been remarked – at least since Rousseau – that this heightened interest in material wealth has been accompanied by a deepening of concern for our mortality – the bourgeois fear of death – something that moderns have great difficulty confronting and dealing with. This motive can be seen to underlie much of the medical industry, its research preoccupations, and the nature of popular interest in things medical with our fervent hopes for its progress. Science might yet save us from this terror. At least it will help us to set aside emotion and just trust the numbers.

The even more recent preoccupation with health and safety is of this same impulse. It may be that economics and insurance concerns are its public face, but it is still the face of an obsession with control and “risk management”. Maybe we can create an algorithm to deal with that.

Mistakes are criminalized, blame is to be apportioned, it is no longer safe for children to climb trees, walk to school, play in the yard. What a blessing it is that we have the internet to keep them indoors and safe! Except that hasn’t worked out too well, because through the internet we can bully each other on-line, cultivate children sexually, and access porn. But we do at least have computer gaming that enables the young to run their risks vicariously.

We have declared war on human fragility and the terrors of our environment. It is no longer the jungles, the deserts and the oceans that are unsafe, it is our homes. Most accidents occur there. We must live in domestic fear. Rational control, with the aid of technology, is the only answer. And we rebel at all this – become boy racers and seek out the lost sense of life in ever new extreme sports, celebrating those who run risks with their lives, just for its own sake.

The idea of reason that we continue to use in all this management – this obsession with control – and that we find to be so inhumane, deadening and life-denying arises from a flaw in the circumstances of the Enlightenment. This is hardly the fault of the thinkers of the Enlightenment – it is our fault for not correcting it.

The Enlightenment declared an intellectual war on the old world, a world in which religious strife had brought it to this crisis. As so often happens when one set of ideas is built to defeat a prevailing set of ideas, the new is shaped by features of the old that it is designed to replace. This is to some extent inevitable, since it will not replace them otherwise. The new needs to be seen as a better candidate than the old, and hence it needs to be seen to fill needs that both the old and the new recognize in common. In this case, the new had to be capable of supplying both the certainty and the authority of the old, and the certainty of the old was supplied by God and faith in God.

Certainty, too, was a necessity when the world, right down to domestic life, had been riven by the uncertainty and terror of sustained conflict and war. The ultimate sanctuary and solace for these things would have been in the arms of God, but this could no longer be guaranteed – particularly at the political or communal level. At best it could reside in the individual heart, but that would not provide the security of the State or its institutions – the external stability necessary to life – and it only provided an ambiguous power to unite people morally. There was an impulse, then, to find something with the authority of divinity – something that seemed to provide the necessary certainty.

And help was at hand. Descartes is often considered the figure to blame, but the science preceded him, and Newton’s mathematical achievements in describing motion gave it the empirical power it needed. Locke, and others, picked up the ball. Philosophers could claim a form of reason that appeared to provide certainty – a certainty that was almost that of divinity. Reason had an authority that was “geometrical”, and the new “philosophy” was apparently based upon it. Philosophy, thus conceived, could solve the problems where religion was failing.

Thus mathematics, and, in philosophy, the formality and certainty of logic, provided the firm ground of confidence that seemed to lie in the core of the fabric of the universe, just as Plato had sought the eternal and invulnerable in mathematics, in his similar anxiety and dismay at the flux and impermanence of appearances, and the fragility of life.

Mathematics seemed to touch divinity in a new way. The radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Spinoza, who was the most reviled – the ultimate dismissal was to be a spinozist – were the ones who advocated the most liberal social arrangements that ultimately led to our modern catalogues of freedom and respect. They advocated a universe that had nothing supernatural in it at all, a material universe without a providential God, a universe that could be explained mathematically, “geometrically”, and they thought to apply the same intellectual tools to social, political and moral arrangements as well.

But though they thought of themselves as bringing that sort of rigour and precision of analysis to the social and political spheres, it is interesting and instructive that, although like us they were enamoured of statistics, they did not communicate their social and political constructions with each other in mathematical or geometrical terms at all. They traded reasons. They tried to be reasonable.

And this is the great modern confusion that we have inherited from the pre-Enlightenment relations of authority, as well as the equation of things intellectual, academic and cerebral with social elites. Reasoning here has come to be identified with obscure, impenetrable systems that purport to plumb the deep mysteries of the universe with high degrees of stability and precision. We see this in the way that the words “reason” and “reasonable” are almost universally confused with the words “logic” and “logical” in popular speech.

When people are instructed to do what is logical, or praised for thinking things out logically, they aren’t usually being instructed or praised for thinking through the formal, or semi-formal relations that hold among precisely defined terms, in propositions, and working out what follows from them deductively, or what they “equate” to in mathematical or logical formulae. They are being instructed to explore reasons carefully, to consider them, weigh them up and reach conclusions; or they are being praised for doing so.

The former is a matter of inputs, and outputs and doing the math. The latter is a matter of accumulating evidence and information, interpreting, and determining relevance, weighing it all up in terms of purposes and means and ends, and of making judgments.

Logic and the complex forms of mathematical representation sometimes used in science can be extremely powerful, disclosing things that we could not see in other ways, revealing high degrees of stability and  enabling high degrees of agreement in judgment, and high degrees of confidence. At the same time, their application is, by those very features, limited to quite a narrow range of applications. Precise and unambiguous definitions which can achieve high degrees of acceptance are required, and they must be stable over time.

The phenomena, too, must be stable and not too swamped with intractable variables. Since the techniques are often statistical, they are often dependent on populations of phenomena, and are less well adapted to the study of individual cases. Within the world of human understanding, the possibilities of these forms of representation are restricted to what Stephen Toulmin referred to as “at most – localized pockets of logical systematicity”. (HU p128)

To mistake logical or mathematical reasoning for the whole of reason, is, as he also pointed out, to indulge in a “cult of systematicity”. (HU pp 52-85) To embrace such a cult is to move away from life as human beings have to live it. You can lose your life in such an embrace. This is why I speak of it as “rational fundamentalism”.

Reasoning, for instance, is not necessarily in competition with feeling at all. Not only do we “feel” reasons, with an emotional “force”, but reasoning can also arise from emotion as well as give rise to it. Indeed, it can change it. Reasoning is often the process you have to engage if you have a passionate curiosity, a desire to understand, a need for an explanation.

It isn’t at odds with intuition, either, or those efforts when you resolve to “sleep on it”, in the hope that the answer will come to you in the morning. The effectiveness of your intuition, and those unconscious nocturnal activities, will depend on what you have already put in there during your lifetime – the experiences you have had, the experiences you have sought out, and how and what you have made of them.

Some responses seem instinctive, but not so many of them are genetically wired-in as might appear. They are learned. The best practitioners don’t do it so perfectly and effortlessly just because they were born that way. It is because of the sorts of practitioners they have made themselves to be. That is why, if we want to be good practitioners, it pays to get around good practitioners.

That is also why philosophy can be a preparation for life. When the time comes, and a decision has to be made, we very likely aren’t going to have the luxury of time and opportunity to think it all through. At best, we may only have the time and mental freedom to explore a very little bit of it. At worst, we may have no time at all. That is why its role is very like all that other kind of simulation and training that we get in all that sports coaching.

The example that resonates most effectively with me comes from watching TV plays of competitors in two-person Olympic canoe slalom events as they manoeuvre through the gates in the artificial rapids. They control the boat with extraordinarily rapid alterations in paddling while being totally dependent upon their partner, at the other end of the canoe, doing just the right thing in much the same way as they deal with the contingencies of the fierce and boiling current. Their focus is totally intense, and I imagine that their minds are equally blank and still while decision piles upon decision in a physical blur. In hindsight, played back on video in slow motion, they could probably give justificatory reasons for each micro-action, yet they weren’t “reasoned out” at the time.

Many of them, though, would have been reasoned out through long hours of briefing, training and debriefing. By the time of execution, all of this is reduced to habit, to muscle memory, to an unconscious and highly variable and mobile repertoire, reading the conditions and responding to them in a highly trained, highly skilled, extremely quick and flexible way.

A New Zealand batsman was asked what was going through his (conscious) mind, during his innings as the player who hit the final shot into the stands that won the cricket World Cup semi-final. “See ball. Hit ball”. And yet of course his batting performance was an exemplar – even a paradigm case – of rational action.

In these cases it hardly matters whose reasons they were that became embedded – the reasons could have been those of the competitor or player, but just as easily they might have been those of the coaching team or even a team-mate. All that matters is that the right practice becomes realized in habit. When it is our own life, though, when it is a matter of a life-forming decision, or the decision has huge ethical consequences, or it is about the treatment of our partner or our friend, or our child, it is vital just whose decision it is, and whose reasons they were that became embedded.

And yet suppose we consider something like a “community of inquiry” or philosophical discussion as the context in which those personal reasons were developed and laid down. What did that reasoning process look like, from the inside? What sorts of “calculations” went on inside our head? On the face of it, in the exchange of evidence, arguments, examples, the weighing of reasons it looks to be a world away from that feverish and complex paddling with a blank mind – miles away from when an instant, event-changing decision needs to be made. Yet there are surprising similarities. Our mind is, in a sense, quite blank as we focus intensely on what is being said – blank and receptive to what they are saying, but also to reactions and responses that just appear to pop up into our head. It occurs to us.

On the heals of what occurs to us, a judgments also pops up, arising equally spontaneously. No, that won’t do, don’t say it. Or – yes but they’ve missed this . . . test this one. There is no geometric calculation or representation here. Just a mind, paddling fast in rough water, and getting better and better at it. We are so focussed and receptive that we can actually watch it – watch it throwing things up and filtering them on the basis of its own extraordinarily complex intellectual habits – performing a sort of intellectual triage which is uniquely our own way of thinking, exercising the freedom of our thought.

Where does certainty lie in all this? Uncertainty has a lot going for it, since it allows the flexibility that growth requires. It is a natural and inevitable phase in any enquiry of any importance. It is a part of the incentive to open up exploration, and to pursue it. The answers are a function of the questions asked, and questioning is often the deliberate creation of a doubt. In this sense, the answers themselves are always somewhat derivative, and at the mercy of the questions.

The most important consideration isn’t the answer, but what precedes it – no matter how gratifying the answer may seem. To become a better paddler, you need to develop a good sense of what is not quite right and how it could be better; the questions and doubts about your paddling. You will know the solution when you see it because of your clarity about the problem it must solve.

Whatever the proper mix of certainty and uncertainty, rational fundamentalism is not the solution to replacing divine authority. We need a softer, gentler conception of reason, one where we are more at home with those cases where reason can barely be found to tip the scales one way or the other, despite the fact that there is much at stake, and in which we can deal with the human implications of reasoning when no outcome can be gussied up to look good.

We need better ways to deal with our fears, to confront our anxieties, to live well with what we cannot control, as well as that which we should not be trying to over-control. We need to look more deeply at the ways in which we might better respond to tragedy – ways that maintain our compassion, but also our strength. We each need to find our own and better answers to these things. We need to think about them, in the real terms of our own lives. We need to let go of the infantile neediness for a surrogate parent to give us the answers, the neediness cultivated by schooling, and learn how to take responsibility for ourselves. We need the educational opportunity.

There is a strand of opinion, however, that makes much of the idea that we shouldn’t over-think life, and that philosophy involves over-intellectualizing everything.

Quite apart from its potential to be a patronizing, even infantilising proposal, it is, at least one of those platitudes that is often offered thoughtlessly and rarely examined. Of course, we shouldn’t over-think life, and there are people who incapacitate their ability to act by worrying about every possibility so much that they can’t reach and stick to decisions. But beyond pathology, the idea can be used to quell opposition and paper-over real issues that are likely to come back to haunt us.

Not “over-thinking life” shouldn’t be used to discourage examination of what we are up to, or that we are contemplating doing. To suggest such a thing is to be cavalier, even cruel, about those many, many people who have come to deeply regret things in life because they never were equipped or inclined to think adequately about them.

We need to have a good understanding about when it is vital to think carefully and clearly, and when to let go and be in the moment. Then we can develop the appropriate habits. We will then have a chance to get our intuitions – our learned reflexes – right. But this is a philosophical issue. We need philosophical engagement to reach our own well-considered judgement of this.

And it is not enough just to know when it matters to think well – we also need to know how to think well when it does count. How do we get this knowledge and skill? By thinking about the issues in a disciplined and effective way. By doing philosophy well.

By practicing. By running through scenarios and considering their possibilities, the possible courses of action that might be taken, and their potential consequences. By checking out the values and assumptions that might be inherent in our views of all of these things. Then, as circumstances in our lives evolve, and decisions must be made, we have ready tools for anticipation and interpretation. Much of the groundwork has already been done.

It should come as no surprise that philosophers addressed this problem as far as two thousand years ago. Well, Plato did. He said that philosophers require much the same courage as soldiers do in war. Any decent soldier has to deal with uncertainty and doubt. They also have to know when to act decisively, as if there is no doubt. That is where the real courage comes in.

Imagine a general who would never act unless they could act with certainty. We should hope that they would not remain a general for very long. Deciding well militarily depends upon a clear knowledge, not only of how much is known, but also both how dubious much of that supposed knowledge probably is, as well as how much else there is to doubt. We should also hope that they will be aware of how costly it is likely to be, in terms of the lives of their own men and women, if they get it wrong. Yet the difference between decisiveness and hesitation is so often the difference between success and failure. Better, in military academy, to teach the roles of doubt, uncertainty, courage and decisiveness and to train and select for these qualities than to offer, as a maxim, “don’t over-think it”.

. . . to think about what?

So what sorts of issues might these philosophical discussions in education be about, then? The range of valuable issues or topics is enormous. I can only offer a suggestive set of hints here. I can’t show the problems they can be for people, let alone unpack them to show further issues. More importantly, I can’t show what issues will emerge, and how – as we engage in the process regularly and consistently together over years, since the process itself will throw up issues, appropriately connected, and with greater discrimination.

But here are a few starting points. Others are littered throughout this book

Relationships and their issues, such as friendship, acquaintanceship, strangers. Loyalty, trust and commitment. Love and sex. Gossip. Knowing ourselves. Knowing another person. What we owe to ourselves and to others. Mistakes and excuses. Betrayals. Forgiveness and repairing relationships. What is involved, and what are the possibilities of rebuilding trust once it has been compromised? Is ignorance bliss?  Conflicts between what we owe ourselves and what we owe others. Respect. Character. Strength of character and weakness of will. Virtue, vice, temptation. Slavery to passion. Why be moral anyway?

Political and social issues, such as our relationship to the group – conformity and independence. Does it ever matter what other people think? What it means that we are social beings – what we owe to communities. Freedom and necessity. Kinds of freedom and dependencies and what we might make of them. Deciding for others. The powers needed to exercise freedom, and the responsibilities they may entail. Authority and power. Political authority. Representation. Conflicts between commitment or duties to family and commitments or duties to community.

The nature of work. The nature of play. Are both necessary to fulfillment? Should there be a social obligation to work? Fulfilling work. Work and necessity. Exploitative and demeaning work. Slavery. Success. Failure. The potential conflict between work and other commitments. Are all pleasures of equal value? Plato’s satisfied pig. Are some ways of living better than others? Does it matter if people don’t know any better? Ignorance is bliss? Should life be planned?

Mortality and fragility. If awareness of mortality alters with age, what are the implications of that awareness or lack of awareness for living well? The fragility of life and its vulnerability to luck and chance. Making decisions when all the options are bad – and living with the consequences. As negative events – betrayals, tragedies, dependencies, regrets – accumulate throughout our lives – how can we live well without our lives declining – or how well can we live as we decline?

These, and many, many other questions. Even when we have extended the list, we could go back through it, populate its elements with cases, and then ask “what should we do?” in this case or that.

The first reflex, no doubt, will be to come up with an answer, sometimes a ready or well-worn one. Things so often begin to change when we put these well-worn answers under the spotlight. The point of doing so is to show how rickety these taken-for-granted answers so often are, and to develop better answers, or to bring them alive again, refreshing them with the kind of experience that can give them – and us – real power and strength, rather than the mere comfort of reiterating the words of a spell that we hope may do some magic.

We table the answers that we have, and then we thoroughly challenge them – challenging what they could mean, and challenging the range of their application with cases, examples and counter-examples. Then we try to make them better, more comprehensive answers, by clarifying the concepts and examples, and by exploring more subtle judgements in their application, enriching them with the appropriate qualifications that the complexities of real life would require. We aren’t looking for the answer, but to grow the discussion so that each of us comes away better prepared for this issue, and issues like it.

We should also seek discussion of educational concepts and issues, particularly of the nature of education itself, distinguishing it from indoctrination by exploring potential examples of indoctrination in some detail. If we are undertaking any of these philosophical enquiries in a context of schooling, classes and courses, these schooling things should be opened up for questioning.

Why is this knowledge? Why should I believe or do what I am being taught? And above all – what is the point? Why should I take this seriously in my life? Why should I study history, or chemistry, or literature, or mathematics? Is this the best sort of history to be doing in order to understand these issues, or to caution us about the judgments already embedded in us by our culture? What is in it for me – for my actual life as I know it now?

These questions must not be an occasion for anxious, teacher-driven answers. The role of teachers should be to listen, and if they are managing  the process, to rigorously follow the facilitation protocols – particularly to resist interfering with the content, or to balance any interference that it seems necessary to make, perhaps by later encouraging its subversion. Done seriously, and in a trusting environment without the grovelling need to please, it should make most contemporary teachers and school leaders weak at the knees for the success and credibility of their conventional intentions.

Would anybody want to participate in such discussions? The Philosophy for Children movement has shown that the process is highly, highly motivating. My own sense is that people generally would be eager to fall in with such discussions, if they could find them readily enough, and that anyone who has experienced them will want more. It is addictive, in the best possible way.

Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960.

Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972.

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018

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