A Philosophy for Education. Aesthetics

The heart of that vigil is the playfulness of the metaphorical imagination. Play is a world of “let’s pretend" to be this or that and comes with the opt-out clause of “not me". For the infant and young child, play can function as reality-testing: the noise made by a toy when rubbed against a wooden cot, the disappearance of a toy behind a cushion and its sudden reappearance, the object that has to be removed to allow a door to opened - all such foster the distinction between the stubborn manifold of what is “out there" and the singularity of the self in its freedom of the "in here”, and thus fulfils the purpose of establishing a balance between them.

The imaginative metaphor originates from and answers to the uncertainty of being human through creating aesthetic symbols of identity - the ritual, the cave painting, the earthly prizes of ornaments taken to the grave - that, being both personal and communal, establish a stability of norms that situate the individual within a society. At the same time, the freedom given to the imagination by the “not me" functions as an ever-present source for a creativity that is limitless, since each age develops new ways of imaginative expression which maintain the impetus towards identity. Of course, this is not to say that the new renders the past obsolete, for we can revisit past achievements to enjoy them with as a great a pleasure, or more, than that on offer in contemporary works.

Let’s go back to that opt-out clause that permits both the affirmation of an identity and the possibility of an escape. For the early human and in many forms of mental illness, that clause could not exist - in the first instance being prohibited by the need for group identity, in the second, through an internalised and overpowering determination: the sane person, said Musil, is full of innumerable insanities, the insane possessed by only one. The liberty given by the not-me is suppressed. Personal freedom, expressed negatively, therefor, always entails the avoidance of a dominating identification that overpowers the sense of a freedom of consciousness.

This is the illness of the authoritarian regime which demands from its citizens a total and exclusive identification with the regime itself. The only art that such regimes can generate is that of protest critical of the regime - that of Kafka or Orwell, for example - for there cannot exist any great work that praises them: there is only propaganda, expressed through approved literature and a tailored educational system. Such regimes are extreme, it may be argued, but there is no shortage of them, and, apparently, no limit to the readiness to submit to the authority of the demagogue in societies that claim to be democracies.

The first virtue of art is the practice of expressive freedom The aesthetic seeks its own freedom, and finds its own identity, in that which confirms the self in a reciprocal relation of self and other. Your experience is not that of imposing yourself upon the other, or of the other imposing itself upon you. There is, rather, a reciprocity of a harmonious duality in which you find yourself in what is other than itself without subduing or being subdued. The relation is one of being, not having, the movement outwards and towards of the intentionality of consciousness in its making the world.

The expressiveness may amount in the first instance to no more than making seemingly uncoordinated marks on paper or producing sounds which lack harmony, but the importance of these early acts lies in their inherent principle of revealing the agency of the self and its future mission of the coordinated expression of composition. These early acts are prior to the teaching of composition with its necessity of organised structure. In this sense, they are acts of innocence, that lack the motivation of the self’s attempts to find itself along with others in shared expressions of concern. But is this not the defining characteristic of childhood? We do not ask contemplation of children.

They have no need "to find themselves” when they are lucky enough to live within the protective love of parents; the idea of finding oneself within a diverse and often conflict-ridden environment has yet to appear, so that the power of the Arts to heal division is not yet felt. But is this not why adult Art often conveys the sense of "looking back” to a state of presumed innocence - songs of experience that ponder and lament a lost innocence. - even though there exists also an understanding that the world is made through the instruments we play?

Wordsworth, when accompanied by a young child, reported, first, a disappointment that his companion seemed not to share his enthusiasm for the gifts of nature, then, a moment later, reflects that his own poetic assertions of the confluence of the human and natural are redundant for the young person whose whole being expresses that supposition. Rilke’s answer to the question of what the poet does, his simple "I praise”, is surely an implicit feature of the child’s attitude, and the one that education should first work upon before any entanglement of the learner in the disordered and divisive. The joys of "just looking”, of singing the praises of the great variety of forms of life "for themselves as they are” without judgment or classification, a phenomenology based upon joy alone, is the major reason why teaching for the early years is so enjoyable to both child and teacher alike. It is the joy of recognition, in which a self recognises (re-cognises) itself in the recognition of the other. It is crucial that this activity of innocent praise remains a vibrant presence in the student’s mind when, of necessity, not only disorder, but also the rationality of objects and techniques, make their appearance. When art takes on the character of overcoming, it can only succeed by opposing despair with the continued presence of the all-inclusive innocence of praise.

The most fundamental reason for the presence of the Arts in the curriculum lies, therefor, in the kind of truth which they exercise, namely, the self’s immersion in that experienced as other than, and a confirmation of, the reality of the child’s sense of a primary identity of belonging in the world: you are in the world and the world is in you in the freedom of the aesthetic imagination. In this sense, the aesthetic is the answer to that most basic task of finding a meaning for one’s own existence. Of course, the “answer" gained through the practice and immersion in the aesthetic is never final. A 2 + 2 = 4 or a press- a-button-and-it-works cannot be the answer, since we exist aesthetically and morally in a world of ever-changing circumstance. The aesthetic orientation is one flexible and open enough to subsume contradiction, and, as we have seen, it can both tolerate contradictions as being the nature of life and, indeed, welcome such contradictions in its world view. When Rilke writes:

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water, say: I am.

We see the two-fold unity of our identity within both the unchanging earth and the ever-changing river, a unity suggestive of the rhythm of a beating heart. But then, when the pleasure of the paradoxes or the logic of contradictory identity are insufficient to appease that greatest loss, the loss of a loved one, we can bring out the metaphors in the shape of the solemn words, the flowers laid, and the music played, all of which serve to surround the necessary silence attendant upon a final vision.