Abstract
Nowadays there is a renewed interest in philosophy as art-of-living. Several prominent authors have pointed out the return of the notion of the good life in philosophy, particularly understood as a form of normative ethics. Questions such as: how should I live have been taken up as a resistance against the dominances of a neo-liberal discourse in all areas of life. This paper is concerned with this renewed interest in philosophy as art-of-living and the form of education that supports this. The main idea is that the commitment from which we live is a subject of change. This way, art-of-living comprises the possibility and the effort to lead on’s life in a reflective way, and not to let it simply go by. Historically this has been connected to the process of becoming educated. In this paper I will take a closer look at this renewed interest in philosophy as the art-of-living by contrasting two different readings of philosophy as the art-of-living. One that is inspired by Oscar Brenifier and one that is inspired by the late Foucault.
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Notes
In relation to this, Brenifierd is very critical towards actual practices of Philosophy for/with Children, as these practices, so he argues, “ha[ve] more to do strictly speaking with the idea of pampering”. “In the wave of popularization of philosophy”, he continues, “such a newly defined vision [fits] consumer society, where the client is king” and this is “contrary to the tradition of philosophy that conceives of thought itself as disturbing activity” (Brenifier 2010b, pp. 2–3).
For Heidegger the concept Sorge (or besorgen) has two main senses: to worry about something or to provide something. The way Heidegger uses the word besorgen includes both senses, but it is to be situated at a more fundamental level. He speaks about besorgen as a being-in-the-world or in the present. And when we are in the present something can become interesting which is at once an experience of care.
The difference for Foucault is that morality presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, one that judges actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values. Ethics, at the other hand, is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say in relation to the ways of existing involved (see Deleuze 1995, p. 114 [my italics]).
Perhaps we should consider whether the metaphor of the dancer and the wrestler are well chosen here. Stiegler (2009) introduces the metaphor of the snail in order to point at the changed experience within a hyper-industrialised society where addressees are always also senders of new needs, never reaching an end, like the inaccessible centre of the vortex of which the snail’s shell consists. The point I want to make is that power and knowledge aren’t in their own enough to establish a dominant form of life, and that always new forms of power and knowledge are coming out—which won’t necessarily be human. Foucault is talking about inventing ways of existing, through optional (self-relational) rules that can both resist power and elude knowledge.
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The title refers to the painting with the famous phrase ‘This is not a pipe’ by the Belgian painter René Magritte. The painting is not ‘the pipe’ but, following Foucault, the representation of the pipe that is being painted. So what Magritte wants to say is that the painting is not the thing, but what we see or the image of the thing. He made us aware of the distance between the thing and the concept or image. Following Foucault, in this paper, I want to introduce the possibility of the inverse of this phrase: ‘this is a pipe’ or ‘this is a philosopher’. The image is the present thing, and the present thing is in its image (see Foucault 1983).
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Vansieleghem, N. This is (Not) a Philosopher: On Educational Philosophy in an Age of Psychologisation. Stud Philos Educ 32, 601–612 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9341-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9341-4