Download Journal of Philosophy of Education

Journal of Philosophy of Education
Volume 38 Issue 4 Page 683 - November 2004
Booknotes
Bob Davis, University of Glasgow
Education is regularly faulted these days for all of the many things it does not do.
Politicians criticise its failure to address everything from diet, through sexual health,
to parenting skills (whatever they are). Somewhat more reflectively, perhaps,
philosophers such as Nel Noddings have pointed to the absence in much
contemporary learning and teaching of a proper concern for experiences we regularly
assume to be central to the attainment of the good life, such as the appreciation of
nature or the understanding of companionship. At a recent conference in Edinburgh,
Reasons of the Heart, devoted to the unusual subject of Education and Myth, Iris Yob
made an eloquent plea for a revival of a sense of the sacred in our schools in
everything from the architecture of our buildings to the celebration of the cycles of the
year. The growing interest in 'spirituality' in certain parts of the literature may prompt
some teachers and academics to reach for their proverbial revolvers, especially when
the women's lifestyle magazine, Cosmopolitan, sententiously announces to its
presumably relieved readership the appointment of its first 'Spirituality Editor'. While
it is tempting merely to dismiss passing fashions of this kind, it may be worth pausing
to consider some of the more serious questions that lie behind them. These questions
were once the lifeblood of learning and teaching and their reappearance in the
attenuated forms of popular journalism and therapy literature might just be an indirect
warning to current educational thought that it has excluded or devalued them at some
cost to its claims on public attention.
A serious and intellectually vigorous inflection of the renewed interest in spirituality
has, for the last few years, accompanied its more vernacular expressions. Since Philip
Blond's important even confrontational Routledge volume of 1998, the
academically accepted term for much of this thought has been 'post-secular
philosophy', his title phrase (Routledge, 1998). It is a term that enrages some, with its
teleological assumptions and its arguably arrogant posture towards the secular
understanding that supposedly preceded it. Regina Schwartz (a contributor to Blond's
original collection) prefers the more conciliatory spatial metaphor of journeying
outwards into terrain that is simultaneously unfamiliar and intimately recognisable. In
a new collection, Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and Theology Approach the
Beyond (Routledge, 2004), Schwartz brings together several of the writers who
contributed to the original Blond book including Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hart and
Graham Ward but modulates the manifesto tone of post-secular philosophy by
encouraging her contributors to focus on the experience of the transcendent, the
mysterious and what Charles Taylor terms 'the cosmic imaginary' in much more local,
cautious explorations of literature, art and religion. Taylor's opening essay, 'A Place
for the Transcendent', sets the agenda for Schwartz's collection by questioning the
coherence of 'a human good radically cut off from transcendence' and rejecting the
current dominance of an 'attitude of disengagement' associated with the 'discipline of
rationality' (p. 10). Later in the collection, an important essay by the late Emmauel
Levinas lays claims to transcendence as a validating context for ethics an ethics,
Levinas suggests, that 'is excellence and elevation beyond being. Ethics is not a
moment of being; it is otherwise and better than being, the very possibility of the
beyond.' (p. 39) The necessarily adversarial tone of Blond's volume is quite
deliberately subdued under Schwartz's editorship by a quieter, more watchful form of
academic reserve, which, while resolute in its critique of the historic division between
immanence and transcendence, attends to the postmodern possibilities for its repair.
Doubtful of reason's totalizing claims to mastery of the objects of knowledge,
morality and the seemingly transparent, self-presenting subject of much postmodern
polemic, the various contributors to the volume patiently examine the possible sources
of a renewed commerce with the transcendent as disclosed in an ambitiously diverse
range of cultural products, from the erotic sublime of modern love poetry to
contemporary reinterpretations of the Book of Job.
In one sense, this is heady stuff, and arguably outwith the scope of contemporary
educational practice, with its exacting attachment to relevance and 'experience'.
Nevertheless, immersion in literature of this kind leaves an abiding sense of the
inadequacy of much that currently passes for everyday learning and teaching. The
curricular areas of Religious and Moral Education, in particular (and with some
notable exceptions), seem routinised and desiccated when set against the backdrop of
these ideas. Why do these questions consistently fail to make their way into our
curriculum in even those subject areas supposedly designed to accommodate them?
The attention in Schwartz's collection to specific images, texts and historical
experiences several of them standard resource materials found in schools, such as
Shakespeare's Othello, images of Fra Angelico paintings and television
advertisements reassuringly grounds the complexities of theory in conventional
objects of educational study and shows how they quite naturally prompt exploration
of the most profound human concerns, if only allowed to do so.
David Jasper's reflection on the role of the desert in his The Sacred Desert: Religion,
Literature, Art and Culture (Blackwell, 2004) adopts a similarly persuasive strategy:
examining the poetics of the desert as an experience in scripture, theology, art, film
and literature in order to probe the metaphorical power of the desert as a locus of
theological, ethical and ontological speculation. The immediacy and accessibility of
much of the cultural material in Jasper's study may initially suggest that the book is no
more than a survey of 'desert texts', of the sort beloved by hard-pressed teachers
struggling to find a unifying theme for an advanced, thematically integrated
programme of work. The range of Jasper's relatively slender monograph is certainly
as vast as his subject matter demands. There is, however, much more going on here.
The Sacred Desert is a book about paradox: the paradox of an almost archetypally
empty environment that simultaneously teems with meaning; the contradiction of
withdrawal to the site least hospitable to human existence that teaches unconditional
hospitality to the other; the coexistence of ultimate absence with the presence of the
God who may be, indeed, precisely a figuration of that absence. Jasper's study of the
myriad ways in which we encounter, flee from and take possession of the desert, from
the Bible to the second war in Iraq, eschews a simple or romantic dialectic of
civilization and wilderness. It endeavours, instead, to recover the language of a
theological humanism, an 'impossible necessity', where oppositions collapse and a
radical decentring of the self occurs one which enables 'a redescription of the world'
(p. 174) to take place as the nakedness of the desert painfully releases the ego from
the temptations of theological and philosophical hubris. Towards the end of the book,
Jasper engages with Derrida's notion of the Force of Law, the originary violence by
which Law legitimates its interpretive authority. Jasper sees vital parallels between
Derrida's insight and the pre-monastic Desert Fathers' 'trek into the desert to find a
silence that is not exterior to language but its very heart'. This is a vision, he warns
educators, that may very well be unteachable, even incommunicable, because it can
be found only in complete solitude: 'For only in such solitude can be discovered the
true nature of human being understood as Total Presence only in the utter
indifference to life is life truly discovered' (p. 161). The barrenness of the desert
recalls, again, Levinas' equally compelling invitation to cross the boundary into the
Other, where our own radical estrangement from all that we take to be authenticating
confederates, enemies, even the self-emptying God is exposed and where the
silent indifference of the desert dissolves the desperate claims over us of power and
fear.
Jasper's book shares with Schwartz's Transcendence a restless dissatisfaction with
much that passes for the current humanistic understanding of religion, art and
'spirituality'. It remains unconvinced by the various appropriations of experiences and
perceptions that, by their very existence, call into question the dubious treaties struck
between the humanities as they are now increasingly organised and the larger goals of
education. The Sacred Desert is peppered with criticism of Western Christian
annexations of the Eastern desert, as both other people's living space and as symbolic
cultural terrain. It is also vexed by the desire of some to see in religious symbolism a
pattern of belief and conduct to which our institutions must simplistically return.
Jasper's is not by any means a conventionally pious or devotional book, nor does it
champion religion in any traditional or dogmatic sense. Indeed, a central impulse of
the book is a religious response to the death of God. The Sacred Desert does,
nevertheless, echo Schwartz's contention that the study of religion needs to recover
some of its original desert subversiveness if it is to distinguish itself decisively from
the forms of comparative 'spirituality' that too often trivialise and exoticise the
curriculum of multicultural (religious) education. The pursuit of enchantment is not
politically, culturally or religiously innocent. The literature that Jasper discusses
dramatises the conflicts to which the journeys into and through the desert necessarily
give rise, arguing that, for even an inescapably post-religious society, the issues raised
by such nomadism replay the deepest preoccupations and probings of both religious
faith and religious doubt.
It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the recent bestsellers in children's
literature, from the pen of legendary children's writer Alan Garner, is a novel obsessed
with religion and with the clash between one residual religious culture and another,
emergent one. Thursbitch (Vintage, 2003; pbk, 2004) is a really quite extraordinary
book, rooted in both historical fact and the contours of the English landscape, past and
present. Originally conceived as a children's novel, it has struck a resonance with
adult readers, not as part of the Rowling-inspired 'kidult' phenomenon in children's
fiction, nor as fantasy-action escapism, but as a story ablaze with the mysteries of
belonging and enchantment, of religion as a complex series of negotiations between
human beings and the natural (and supernatural) environments they inhabit.
Thursbitch tells the story of John Turner, an eighteenth-century packman, whose
death on the snowbound Pennine hilltracks leaves an emotional legacy that
powerfully attracts the interest of two twenty-first century researchers, Ian and Sal.
Their investigations into the life and death of John Turner become a gradual
disclosure of the mysteries of the valley of Thursbitch and the archaic pagan history
hidden in its seemingly sentient landscape and in its religiously-charged past. For
Garner, history, language and faith converge in the spiritual and material
marginalisation of a people and a region by the implacable forces of historical and
economic change. In the name of a new centralising religio-political authority, that by
its very nature foreshadows the advent of modernity, an aggressive puritan
Christianity comes at last to the isolated valley spearheading a religious regime
change and bent fanatically upon the erasure of the secret chthonic animal cults
through which people, landscape and cosmos have been symbolically reconciled from
time immemorial. The final form of this new order is not, however, a triumphant
institutional Church (averse though Garner remains to credal Christianity), but the
secular modernity in which Garner strands his twenty-first century protagonists, Ian
and Sal deracinated, technologised, vaguely diseased and uncomprehending of the
disfigured landscape to which it demands 'access' and which reluctantly falls subject
to the instruments of Ian and Sal's new religion, science. For all the subterranean
darkness of his vision, and the violence of his life and death, a chastened Ian and Sal
come to revere the figure of John Turner, eventually viewing him as the magus of a
spiritual health from which they feel themselves cut off and for the loss of which they
feel indefinably responsible.
Liberal educational opinion might find important aspects of Garner's myth-making
disturbing, and several influential reviewers have dissented from its suggestive
submission to the instinctual and the irrational in human affairs. Thursbitch, however,
is not a refusal of history in the name of myth, nor merely nostalgia for premodernity.
As a work of fiction, it strives to complete a task educators have traditionally prized in
imaginative literature: reintegrating the fissiparous elements of nature and culture,
reaching out to heal the divisions between immanence and transcendence and the
traumas inflicted on its members by industrial society, even when they are least aware
of their own injuries. It performs this work in ways that both Regina Schwartz and
David Jasper would surely endorse: not by a simplistic repudiation of modernity but
by a restoration of the imaginative faculties through which modernity is to be
understood and reformed.
Pat Kane's long awaited 'manifesto for a different way of living' (subtitle), the
boldly-titled The Play Ethic (Macmillan, 2004) is also concerned with the
reformation and redesign of the way we live, and also aspires to reconnects us
with suppressed and devalued elements of our collective emotional and cultural
history. The Play Ethic is a deliberate rejoinder to the work ethic, the enduring
legacy of which is one of the principal targets of Kane's polemic. Indeed, it is
possible to see in Kane's ancestral immigrant Catholicism one of the sources of
his ongoing (and admittedly oversimplified) quarrel with the Presbyterian
emphasis on labour and production. This is a manifesto vulnerable in many
places to misunderstanding, not because of any serious shortcomings in the
argument which is substantial but because of the popular misconceptions
that cling obstinately to the key terms Kane wishes to debate. The Play Ethic is,
in fact, a sophisticated critique of what we now habitually term 'late industrial
society' and its obsession with the idea of work. The book fuels its critique by
elaborating a rigorous theory of play that skilfully picks its way through the
major theorists and studiously avoids stereotypical or self-indulgent
representations of leisure or pleasure or idleness. Indeed, Kane is cheerfully
critical of the encouragement of the 'leisureholic' society, with its 24-hour
drinking, its acquisitive addiction to 'fun' and its trashy, multichannel lifestyle
marketing. Conversely, he is impressed by the dynamism of the theory and
practice of play as these have evolved in the philosophy of early years education
and in the pedagogical methods of preschool and nursery education. He is
puzzled by the almost complete disappearance of the concept of play from
mainstream educational thought in nearly every other sector. He tries to
demonstrate that the society emerging from the passing of the industrial age will
be one in which play will assume the central social and economic role that
practitioners of early education have traditionally advocated. Shifts in the
patterns of production and consumption associated with the rise of the
networked society are indisputably restructuring the relationship between work
and creativity in ways that threaten to subvert the regulatory systems of
contemporary education. Kane documents numerous examples of pressure
groups, local communities, professional and entrepreneurial associations that
have stepped outside the established logistical patterns of work, study and
employment, applying networked technologies to create new forms of
production, politics and debate. Whether the scale or character of this new
'netocracy' legitimates the claim that it has formulated a genuinely alternative
ethic remains open to question. Kane acknowledges all of the criticisms levelled
at the shortcomings of cyberspace as a moral medium, but his interests lie in the
forms of ethical behaviour it has helped to sustain in areas of economic, social
and cultural activity. Here his analysis is insightful and remains a challenge to
the many educators who still believe the printing press was just a faster means of
writing.
The Play Ethic also makes some stimulating observations on the relationship
between play and spirituality, pointing sombrely to the ominous last written
words of the 9/11 terrorists: 'the time for play is over and the serious time is
upon us' (p. 319). The spirituality of play may be a part of the countercultural
religion of the age of terror and its politics of fear. Contrary to several of the
contributors to Regina Schwartz's book, Kane sees new forms of spirituality
actively permeating the products of popular culture in technological society,
reinvigorated by the return to the medium of ancient and fundamental questions
of identity, immaterial subjectivity, embodiment and personhood, each
relegitimised by our habitation of the digital universe: 'To imagine ourselves,
rather than allow ourselves to be imagined, has to be the key demand of the
players' spiritual community' (p. 323). It may be that Kane is correct and that
the Net materialises a renovated theology, 'where individuals exist both in
themselves and in relation to every other individual' (p. 325) and where the
language of spirituality is lent a new purchase and purpose for a truly mass
audience. It is also possible that the patterns of play that Pat Kane quite
convincingly describes will collapse into a very old kind of narcissism, a
nightmare of unremitting immanence of the sort of which Regina Schwartz's
team is deeply fearful. Las Vegas is surely capital of one of the kingdoms of play,
but it occupies the kind of desert that does not figure in David Jasper's
emancipatory classifications.
The Play Ethic is a book that might well find its way on to bibliographies in
educational philosophy and theory. The uneasy feeling remains, however, that
the practice of education is increasingly ill-equipped to respond to the deeper
questions posed by it, just as it seems too often tongue-tied in the face of the
issues raised by Schwartz, Jasper and Garner. The inability to acknowledge the
widening gulf that separates contemporary learning and teaching from these
themes is a danger to education, for reasons that all of these authors make clear.
If education surrenders to other areas of the culture the capacity to respond
intelligently to the spiritual, what else might it lose in the process?
Bob Davis, University of Glasgow Journal of Philosophy of Education
Volume 38 Issue 4 Page 683 - November 2004