futures for philosophy of education

309 Pages·2009·1.17 MB·English

FUTURES FOR PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
MICHAEL A. PETERS
University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign
[email protected]
When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of
the future and know the present will you understand it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/Nietzsche/history.htm
ABSTRACT. Philosophy of the future is a platform for rethinking the phi-
losophy of education and policy futures in education. While policy futures
may draw on the techniques and methodologies of futures studies it is not
reducible to this field, or to its siblings--futurology, scenario planning, fore-
sight, or science fiction. I am much more inclined to see futures in an ap-
plied philosophical framework that is akin to what Foucault, after Nietzsche,
calls ‘histories of the present’ which is driven by a genealogical investiga-
tion of value and guided by the epistemological question of how the his-
torical awareness of our present circumstances affect what and how we
know and can know.
1. Introduction
The title for the paper is filched from Brian Leiter’s (2004)
The Future for Philosophy and draws explicitly on his ‘Introduction’
at least in two main respects. Leiter’s admirably clear thesis is that
analytic philosophy in its postwar incantation following the ‘linguistic
turn’ has taken two routes: Wittgensteinian quietism where phi-
losophy, after the ‘end’ of philosophy, dissolves into a kind of the-
rapy and Quinean naturalism where philosophy becomes on a par
with science. While he recognizes and documents some defensive
moves by those who wish to rescue analytic philosophy by iden-
tifying a distinctive method such as ‘conceptual analysis’ he also
argues that these defensive moves (let’s call it the strategy ‘de-
fensive modernism’) arrogate a much more modest status and role
for conceptual analysis, so much so that it is hard to see the differ-
ence between it as a method and descriptive sociology.1 Analytic
philosophy ‘survives, if at all, as a certain style that emphasizes
“logic”, “rigor”, and “argument’” (p. 12). Yet Leiter gives much more
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importance to the trend he calls Quinean naturalism and his Intro-
duction and the collection suffers in that he does not explore care-
fully enough the strand he calls Wittgensteinian quietism but more
on this a little later.2
What his analysis does, however, is provide a ground for
him to reassess the analytic-Continental divide. With the ‘disso-
lution’ of analytic philosophy into its two principal strands the dis-
tinction dissipates and, I would add, therefore, also dissolves its
rhetorical and ideological representations and they way they have
served various institutional, discursive and pedagogical purposes
with regard to the contemporary place and status of philosophy.
Leiter goes on to explain that where one side of the divide has
‘dissolved’ (my word), the other side has ‘become a meaningless
category’ (p. 12). “Continental philosophy’ is a reductionist category:
it is not one tradition but many (seven to nine separate traditions).
Gutting (2005) usefully indicates that it may be the case that there
is no fruitful analytic-Continental division in terms of ‘substantive
doctrines’ yet it is possible to ‘draw a significant distinction between
analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of their conceptions of
experience and reason as standards of evaluation’ which he ex-
plains as follows:
Typically, analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of com-
mon-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transfor-
mations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic. Con-
tinental philosophy, by contrast, typically sees experience as penetrating
beyond the veneer of common-sense and science, and regards reason as
more a matter of intellectual imagination than deductive rigor. In these
terms, Continental philosophy still exists as a significant challenge to the
increasing hegemony of analytic thought and, as such, deserved a hearing
in this volume.
2. Futures of Philosophy of Education
Philosophers became preoccupied with images of the future only
after they gave up hope of gaining knowledge of the eternal. Philosophy
began as an attempt to escape into a world in which nothing would ever
change. The first philosophers assumed that the difference between the
flux of the past and the flux of the future would be negligible. Only as they
began to take time seriously did their hopes for the future of this world
gradually replace their desire for knowledge of another world.4
Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the Future’, Belgrade Circle session, 20
August 1994, http://www.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/issues/two/rorty.html.
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So far we can draw out some possible Leiter consequen-
ces for the future for philosophy of education that follow from his
analysis:
1. Analytic philosophy of education might be described in terms of
the strands of Wittgensteinian ‘therapy’ and Quinean naturalism;
2. Analytic philosophy of education might also survive as a ‘style’ of
philosophizing.3
With philosophy of education as developed by the so-
called ‘London school’ we need to take into account the notion of
‘effective history’ and an inaugurating tradition that has its own
powerful legacy. Leiter does also provide an account of the re-
newed significance of the history of philosophy which characterizes
his own chapter and his discussion of the ‘masters of suspicion’
(Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, after Ricoeur) although he does not
discuss disciplinary histories or their effectivity.
We could also argue on the basis of the criticisms mentioned that:
3. Greater emphasis might be given to exploring the Wittgenstein-
ian strand; and
4. Given that there are no convincing reasons for sustaining the old
distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy, or rather
for holding that it is a meaningful distinction to make nowadays, we
ought (at least, descriptively) to admit that ‘Continental’ philosophy
(or its strands), prima facie, provide possibilities for the future of
philosophy of education (even although once the distinction has
only historical significance it is not possible to characterize it asone
tradition). Following Leiter we will have to admit several (7-9) tra-
ditions (and have to evaluate each one).
Already it is clear that more properly we ought to talk about
futures (in the plural) rather than the future of philosophy of edu-
cation. This point is of broader significance for it also takes us to
the heart of Leiter’s project and to an objection that has to be con-
fronted concerning the concept of the future which is treated un-
problematically by Leiter, almost as though the future emerges as a
condition of the past history of contemporary philosophy. In other
words, Leiter does not give the notion of the future itself a philo-
sophical treatment.
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3.Nietzsche and Nihilism: The Creation of New Value
It was Nietzsche who said ‘The future influences the pre-
sent just as much as the past’ and Paul Valery, the French poet
and critic, who said ‘The future isn't what it used to be.’ In the past
philosophers have attempted to lay down principles for a philo-
sophy of the future: I am thinking not only of Nietzsche but also
Feuerbach’s (1843) Principles of Philosophy of the Future and
Bloch’s (1970) A Philosophy of the Future.5 My starting point is
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger--‘prophets of postmoder-
nity’ (as I call them)--who provide some ground on which to stand.
Nietzsche, of the three, perhaps most explicitly addressed ques-
tions of the future. In a work that was to have been his second
book, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,6 portions of
which appear in Untimely Meditations,7 he called for radical educa-
tional reform presented in the form of a prolonged narrative dia-
logue. Beyond Good and Evil8 was subtitled A Prelude to a Philo-
sophy of the Future and he often talked of ‘philosophers of the
future’ who have a specific task:
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground
for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value,
to determine the true hierarchy of values.
In the Preface to The Will to Power, Nietzsche describes
himself as the ‘perfect nihilist of Europe’ but one, at the same time,
who had ‘lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it
behind, outside himself’ (p. 3). As he writes, again in the Preface,
the title –The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values
– is formulated as a countermovement that will take the place of
nihilism, but which at the same time logically and psychologically
presupposes it in the sense that only after the advent of nihilism
can we realize that nihilism is the logical extension of our values.
Only after our experience of nihilism can we discover for the first
time what these values really meant, and what real value they had.
Only at that point, will we realize that we require new values.
Most of the standard works of reference begin with the
Latin root nihil which means ‘nothing’, to emphasise that the word
was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to negatively characterise trans-
cendental idealism, and later by Ivan Turgenev in his novel Father
and Sons (1862) to describe the character Bazarov, who accept no
authority or doctrine that is not supported by proof.9
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Martin Heidegger (1991, orig. 1961), in the fourth volume
of his major work Nietzsche, entitledNihilism, based on a series of
lectures given in 1940 and a treatise composed during the years
1944-46, indicates also that the first use of the word nihilism stems
from Jacobi. Heidegger, then he also refers to Turgenev, thus:
Later the word nihilism came into vogue through Turgeniev as a
name for the notion that only what is perceptible to our senses, that is, only
beings that one experiences oneself, only these and nothing else are real
and have being. Therefore, anything grounded on tradition, authority, or
any other definitive value is negated (Heidegger, 1991, IV: 3).
Heidegger remarks that this view is normally called posi-
tivism and he proceeds to compare Jean Paul’s usage of the word
in relation to romantic poetry to Dostoievsky’s usage of the term in
his Foreword to his Pushkin Lectures, delivered in 1880, where he
talks of the ‘typical negative Russian character … who denies Rus-
sia and himself’.
To Nietzsche, Heidegger remarks, the word nihilism
means something more. He writes:
Nietzsche uses nihilism as the name for the historical movement
that he was the first to recognize and that already governed the previous
century while defining the century to com, the movement whose essential
interpretation he concentrates in the terse sentence: ‘God is dead’ (Hei-
degger, 1991, IV: 4).
The prehistory of the concept, so to speak – that is, the
use of the word and its history before it was given its definitive
stamp by Nietzsche – is governed by the political context of late
19th century Russia. Thus, as the Catholic Encyclopaedia makes
clear:
The nihilist they was formulated by Cernysevskij in his novel “Cto
delat” (What shall be done, 1862-64), which forecast a new social order
constructed on the ruins of the old. But essentially, Nihilism was a reaction
against the abuses of Russian absolutism; it originated with the first secret
political society in Russia founded by Pestel (1817), and its first effort was
the military revolt of the Decembrists (14 Dec., 1825). Nicholas 1 crushed
the uprising, sent its leaders to the scaffold and one hundred and sixteen
participants to Siberia. The spread (1830) of certain philosophical doctrines
(Hegel, Saint Simon, Fourier) brought numerous recruits to Nihilism,
especially in the universities; and, in many of the cities, societies were
organized to combat absolutism and introduce constitutional government
(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/110744a.htm).
17
Nihilism, in the modern context emerges in a political con-
text, closely associated with Alexander Herzen (1812-70) and the
anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814-76), who advocated the over-
throw of the existing order in Old Russia. As the doctrine was
picked up it became fused with anarchism and socialism, and
eventually lost its political force by the late 1870s. The entry ‘Rus-
sian nihilism’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995:
702) provides the following account:
Russian nihilists urged the ‘annihilation’ – figurative and literal – of
thepast andpresent, i.e., of realized social and cultural values and of such
values in process of realization, in the name of thefuture, i.e., for the sake
of social and cultural values yet to be realized. Bakunin, as early as 1842,
had stated the basic nihilist theme: ‘the negation of what exists … for the
benefit of the future which does not yet exist’.
What is of interest here in relation to Nietzsche is both the
orientation to the future and to the creation of new values. There is
also a clear atheistic bent to some forms of Russian nihilism that
predated Nietzsche.
4.Knowledge Cultures and Philosophy of Education
Knowledge cultures is an approach to philosophy of edu-
cation that ties it to contemporary debates about knowledge and
the value of knowledge, especially those accounts that draw on the
concepts of ‘postindustrialism’, ‘postFordism’, ‘knowledge eco-
nomy’, ‘creative economy’ and open source models of scientific
communication, scholarship and science. In this paper I do not
have the space to defend this broad approach to the philosophy of
education10 as I need to be programmatic in setting out an agenda
which is concerned not only with the idea of creating the future but
also that is critical in an accepted sense. Such an approach needs
to be non-deterministic especially in relation to technology, sen-
sitive to cultural difference, and radically interdisciplinary. Most im-
portantly, it needs to accept there is a logical as well as temporal
asymmetry between the future and the past.11
Philosophy of the future is a platform for rethinking the
philosophy of education and policy futures in education. While po-
licy futures may draw on the techniques and methodologies of fu-
tures studies it is not reducible to this field, or to its siblings—fu-
turology, scenario planning, foresight, or science fiction. I am much
more inclined to see futures in an applied philosophical framework
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that is akin to what Foucault, after Nietzsche, calls ‘histories of the
present’ which is driven by a genealogical investigation of value
and guided by the epistemological question of how the historical
awareness of our present circumstances affect what and how we
know and can know.12 Consider ‘histories of the future’ a separate
but parallel critical activity. It is an approach that I have attempted
to develop and exemplify over the past few years through the
establishment of journals and books series, and through various
books and courses.13
In this brief paper I want to draw attention to one aspect of
this program that I have called ‘Knowledge Cultures’ which I have
addressed in terms of three specific aspects: ‘Open source, open
access, and free science’ (see ‘Postscript’ in Peters & Besley,
2006). In Nietzsche’s terms I am trying to determine the true hier-
archy of values in relation to knowledge futures, and, on some
indicative evidence I want to assert the value offreedom to relation
to the future of knowledge.14 ‘Freedom’ on the standard account
has been defined as freedom from the dependence on the will of
others—which is the classic statement by the tradition of nineteenth
British liberalism stated first by Locke, then elaborated by Mill,
Bentham, Green and others, and later adopted in the twentieth
century by Hayek in his influential The Constitution of Liberty. This
notion of liberty, which is at the heart of liberalism in both its Pro-
testant and Catholic forms, is also historically tied to democracy
and to the development free intellectual inquiry, the modern uni-
versity and the value of openness. Academic freedoms, stemming
from freedom of speech, refer to alleged rights of students, teach-
ers and institutions to pursue the truth or persuade, without political
suppression.15 The U.S. Supreme Court in Regents of the Univer-
sity of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 312; 1978 states that aca-
demic freedom means a university can ‘determine for itself on aca-
demic grounds: who may teach; what may be taught; how it should
be taught; and who may be admitted to study.’ This is not the place
to pursue the full genealogy of freedom in its academic forms, suf-
fice to say:
• that today the value of freedom in relation to the distribution,
access and exchange of knowledge is under threat at an historical
moment that also provides unparalleled opportunities for the esta-
blishment of open global architectures;
• that the study of education should concern itself in a critical way
with the historical forms of freedom and their development--of ex-
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pression and of speech, of freedom to learn, and of freedom to pu-
blish; and,
• that the assertion and establishment of these freedoms take dif-
ferent historical forms and pose different technical, political and
ethical problems for knowledge futures, including those of copyright,
intellectual property, and plagiarism.
I make this last claim on the basis of an assumed mate-
rialism and historicism in regard to knowledge. The lesson I take
from Marx, and from Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is that
knowledge and the value of knowledge is rooted in social relations.
In order to investigate the geneaology of the value of knowledge in
relation to its freedoms, its freedoms-to-come, and their educatio-
nal siginificance we must critically examine its various emergent
institutional and networked forms as well as the obstacles to
them.16 This is an imperative for futures of education in general and
also for a coherent and progressive programme of research and
scholarship of philosophy of education.
In the practical context this program means an investi-
gation of the value of openness and the mode of open production.
Openness has emerged as an alternative mode of social produc-
tion based on the growing and overlapping complexities of open
source, open access, open archiving, open publishing and open
science. It has become a leading source of innovation in the world
global digital economy increasingly adopted by world govern-
ments, international agencies and multinationals as well as lead-
ing educational institutions. It is clear that the Free Software and
‘open source’ movements constitute a radical non-propertarian al-
ternative to traditional methods of text production and distribution.
This alternative non-proprietary method of cultural and knowledge
exchange threatens traditional models and the legal and institu-
tional means used to restrict creativity, innovation and the free
exchange of ideas. In terms of a model of communication there
has been a gradual shift from content to code in the openness,
access, use, reuse and modification reflecting a radical persona-
lization that has made these open characteristics and principles
increasingly the basis of the cultural sphere. So open source and
open access has been developed and applied in open publishing,
open archiving, and open music constituting the hallmarks of ‘o-
pen culture.’ The values of freedom and openness are the meta-
values that will determine knowledge cultures in the future and,
therefore, also the production of knowledge.
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NOTES
1. Despite analytic philosophy’s ‘dissolution’ institutionally it lives on
and has made it itself the world of blogging (cid:177) see David Chalmers’ ‘Phi-
losophical Weblogs’ at http://consc.net/weblogs.html. See Leiter’s own blog
at http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/the_future_for.html.
2. Gary Gutting (2005) makes this point by emphasizing that over
half the contributors, including Cartwright, Chalmers, Goldman, Kim, Pettit,
Railton, and Leiter himself, adopt naturalistic approaches, while the rest
are neutral with the exception of Hurka’s defense of the autonomy of ethi-
cal theory. There ought to be more representatives of anti-naturalist phi-
losophers. I would argue that the collection, as good as it is, suffers expli-
citly from the fact that there is little in the way of exploring the conse-
quences of the Wittgensteinian strand, especially in the work of Stanley
Cavell and the philosophers of the ‘new’ Wittgenstein (see Crary & Reed,
2000). Gutting also comments that the collection does not include work of
either metaphysicians (a priori philosophizing) or Continental philosophers.
It is with the Wittgensteinian strand (although not exclusively) that I identify
(see, in particular, Peters & Marshall, 1999; Peters, Burbules & Smeyers,
2008 in which I explicitly address the ‘therapy’ theme; see also Saito &
Standish, 2009).
3. I think this point needs to be amplified considerably. For Leiter,
survival as a ‘style’ seems to be less of an option whereas for me it counts
very substantially and especially for what I call ‘philosophy as pedagogy’
(see Peters, 1999). This matter of ‘conceptual analysis’ as a kind of style
and kind of writing requires much more research especially it relation to
guiding values of ‘clarity’ and the like (see my essay on Wittgenstein and
therapy in Peters et al, 2007). We might also investigate the very inte-
resting similarities and contrasts, say, between R.S. Peters appeals to
Wittgenstein and conceptual analysis and Deleuze & Guattari’s (2000) role
of philosophy as ‘concept creation’. In this regard also see Peters (2001;
2002).
4. Rorty argues: ‘Hans Blumenberg has suggested that philoso-
phers began to lose interest in the eternal toward the end of the Middle
Ages, and that the sixteenth century, the century of Bruno and Bacon, was
the period in which philosophers began trying to take time seriously. Blum-
enberg is probably right, but this loss of interest only became fully self-
conscious in the nineteenth century. This was the period in which Western
philosophy, under the aegis of Hegel, developed detailed and explicit
doubts not only about Platonic attempts to escape from time but about
Kantian projects of discovering ahistorical conditions for the possibility of
temporal phenomena. It was also the period in which it became possible,
thanks to Darwin, for human beings to see themselves as continuous with
the rest of nature - as temporal and contingent through and through, but
none the worse for that. The combined influence of Hegel and Darwin
moved philosophy away from the question “What are we?” to the question
21
“What might we try to become?”’. See also Leaman (2002) who asks
‘Where is philosophy going? Are we entering a post-philosophy millenium?’
5. Feuerbach writes: ‘The culmination of modem philosophy is the
Hegelian philosophy. The historical necessity and justification of the new
philosophy must therefore be derived mainly from a critique of Hegel's.’
For his Principles of Philosophy of the Future (1843) see http://www.
marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/. N.B. all websites
mentioned are accessed September 17th & 18th 2006, unless otherwise
stated.
6. Seehttp://www.publicappeal.org/library/nietzsche/Nietzsche_vario
us/the_future_of_our_educational_institutions.htm.
7. See http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/um.htm.
8. See e.g., http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/
works/ge/nietzsc1.htm.
9. See, for instance, The Catholic Encyclopaedia (http://www.new-
advent.org/cathen/11074a.htm) and The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philo-
sophy(http://www.utm.edu/resaerch/iep/n/nihilism.htm). There is a different
of interpretation here as the latter represents Bazarov’s position as “crude
scientism” based upon “a creed of total negation”, while the former, more
kindly and accurately, insists that “a Nihilist is one who bows to no authority
and accepts no doctrine, however widespread, that is not supported by
proof”, which is almost an exact translation from Turgenev’s novel. Tur-
genev’s novel was set against the social and political transformation of 19th
century Russia. Bazarov’s nihilism symbolised the complete refusal on be-
half of the intelligentsia to believe in the values of the past generation. For
the full text online see (http://www.eldritchpress.org/ist/fas.htm).
10. I have addressed this theme a number of times and progressively
over the years: see Peters (1998, 2002, 2006), Peters & Marshall (1999),
Peters, Marshall & Smeyers (2001).
11. This issue is fundamental to future studies and also my own take:
is the ‘flow’ of time subjective? The philosophy of time has been dominated
by disagreements between two views of the nature of temporal reality: one
side argues, after John McTaggart, that there is an objective distinction
between past, present and futures and the other side argues that there is
an objective distinction between earlier and later but that the experience of
the flow of time is an illusion. See e.g., http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
time-thermo/ and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/. Re-
cently chaos theory has returned to Boltzmann’s problem to suggest that
‘dynamical chaos is the rule, not the exception, with our world, ... the past
is fixed [but] the future remains open and we rediscover the arrow of time’
(Coveney and Highfield 1990, pp. 37-8) but see http://www.usyd.edu.au/
time/price/preprints/ISST.html .
12. Foucault, following Heidegger, reconceptualise space and time in
non-Cartesian terms. The Cartesian mathematical conceptualisation of
space and time (as aggregates of points and instants respectively) is re-
placed by an experiential and ontological understanding of space and time.
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