A poiesis of peace: imagining, inventing & creating cultures of peace. The qualities of the artist for peace education

ABSTRACT

In this theoretical article, the qualities of the artist for peacebuilding and peace education are explored. Peacebuilding and peace education are not only based on skills and knowledge, but also on art, a creative process that originates in our imagination. The question guiding this paper is: How can we, as peacebuilders and educators, imagine, invent, and create cultures of peace and build spaces for others to do so? Based on Lederach’s moral imagination, I present a conceptualization of a poiesis of peace as a frame for peace education. This so-called poiesis of peace is built on the sensibility of the heart as the feeling center that can perceive the imaginal and the relationality of breath as described by Irigaray as a field of intersubjectivity and interconnectedness. The potential of this imaginative sensibility is the ability to feel into another experience, described as empathy and resonance, which might manifest as an ethics of care and nonviolence. Using arts based methods in peace education can be one way to encourage feelings of interconnectedness and empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace education
• imagination
• empathy
• ethics
• sensibility

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to articulate the potential of imagination and the qualities of the artist for peace education. Today more than ever, in the midst of crisis, we might question the structures of the societies we live in, and wonder what frame could ensure the future we wish for. Which economic system is in balance with our social and ecological world/Mitwelt? How can we create local and global solidarity during moments of crisis and fragmentation? How can we transform structures of inequality, coloniality and racism? In the webinar Peace Education and the Pandemic: Global Perspectives from 13. April, 2020, Janet Gerson asks for a pedagogy of interconnectedness and interdependence that recognizes interconnected relationships built on respect and dignity. Betty Reardon queries for new pedagogies that connect the dots, and Gloria María Abarca Obregón highlights the importance for an ethic of care. In the midst of the current ecological, social, economic, psychological and ontological crisis it seems what we need or what people ask for, are new stories and imaginations of interdependence, interconnectedness and care instead of separation and violence.

The question that moves me is: How can we, as peacebuilders and educators, imagine, invent, and create cultures of peace and build spaces for others to do so? In this paper, I attempt to conceptualize a poiesis of peace focussing on imagination, symbolized as a quality of the artist, which is crucial for peace educators and peacebuilders. I am especially interested in the sensibility aspect of imagination that encourages empathy and care.

Imagination and cultures of peace

Imagine there’s no heaven.

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion, too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will be as one

John Lennon

Peace Studies, and especially Peace Education, are disciplines that are concerned with the strive for social change towards cultures of peace and a good life for all. A core mandate of peace education was expressed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in the late 1980s with the expression Culture of Peace, which ‘presumes peace as a way of being, doing and living in a society that can be taught, developed, and best of all, improved upon’ (Shaikh 2014, 14). Peace as a way of being, doing and living implies peace as an embodied and relational experience, not only as an intellectual endeavor. Drawing on Tanahashi, peace activist and artist, (2018) ‘an artist is someone who makes full use of imagination-who goes beyond the boundaries of conventional seeing and thinking’ (n.p.). The qualities of the artist and her/his potential of imagination and ability of going beyond conventional seeing and thinking is crucial for imagining, inventing and creating cultures of peace that are based on love, solidarity, dialogue, care, community, belonging and recognition. The word poiesis means, ‘to make,’ and ‘peace is constantly to be made’ (Giesen, Kersten, and Škof 2017, 2).

As the famous sentence of the UNESCO Constitution (1945) says: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.’ In an imaginative understanding, peace is not the absence of war, because ‘peace like war, is imagined in the minds of human. So, both are, in fact, results of poesis. In this sense they are imbricated’ (Mendieta 2017, 13). Imagination in particular is not only a constructing act in the minds of humans, but rather a poetic, embodied act. Kaplan (1972) describes Bachelard’s philosophy of imagination as the force of physic production that can manifest new images ‘as excess in all modes of awareness’ (3). The poetic is the creative power that can give ‘a new form to the world’ (3). Bachelard views imagination within a similar realm of knowing as empathy and intuition. Like an affective knowledge which is not an empirical description but a feeling of the fundamental value, which he describes metaphorically as:

It is not knowledge of the real which makes us passionately love it. It is rather feeling which is the primary and fundamental value. One starts by loving nature without knowing it, by seeing it well, while actualizing in things a love which is grounded elsewhere. Then, one seeks it in detail because one loves it on the whole, without knowing why (Kaplan 1972, 4).

Huang (2012) explores the poetical dimension of morality in Bachelard’s work and describes it as ‘a moral intuition implied in the poetic images’ (49). He gives the example of a poem that ‘evokes a certain ethical image in a dynamic way and surpasses reason by activating ethical sense for action’ (50). An image can give orientation for an ethical action because it evokes an engagement with others and the world. Images are sensual, concrete and alive and therefore connect us to affective knowledge, various forms of awareness also unconscious reveries and archetypes that animate the psyche. Poetic images consist of physic and psychic reality (Kaplan 1972, 3–20). Therefore, we can relate to images and artwork on various levels, conscious and unconscious, physic and psychic, mentally and emotionally.

Fumanti (2015) builds his concept of imagination drawing on Aristotle’s idea of imagination as the human ability to know the world through sense and reason and Sartre’s idea of imaginative consciousness that can free the person from a limiting reality (117). Yet for both of them imagination starts with perception but goes further. For Satre imaginative consciousness is the creative intention to constitute the world (131). Through the act of imagining we are not only constituting the world but we can also relate to the life of others in an affective and existential sense.

If we take relationality as the core of the human condition, and imagination as that which allows humans to rethink relations between the limits of what they perceive as real then we can possibly argue that when human beings (re-)imagine the world they (re-)imagine it through relations and/or through the absence of them (Fumanti 2015, 120).

Depraz (2010), relying on Husserl, Satre and Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology, describes imagination as an intersubjective concept and a state directed towards the world.

Consequently, imagination is not an isolated activity, which would, again, trap the subject within itself: it is closely related to perception, remembering, and empathy, since all of these acts of consciousness are identified as intentional, that is, as directed toward their object (imagined, perceived, remembered, or empathized) and opened up toward the world (155).

An artist who paints a sunset will rely on previous perceptions of a sunset and secondly will also create something new: ‘an unknown reality, that is, as the opening of the way for another perceptions of sunsets for both the spectator and the creator’ (Depraz 2010, 155). Perception is directed towards an object and imagination expands the actual existence of an object and creates openness for new and multifarious possibilities (156). In Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) latest work, The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumous, he drafted his unfinished ideas, an ontology of the sensible, where he is trying to intertwine or twist the dichotomy of an autonomous self and an autonomous world. Especially the art of Balzac and Cézanne inspired him to discover perception as a process of sensual openness that is different from a pure conceptual understanding of the world. Perception as presence to the world (présence au monde) is an aesthetic and sensual experience that unveils deeper structures of reality (Merleau-Ponty 1968).

We can ‘transform images of violence and war, not by reproducing them, but rather how through a lens of compassion, humility and grace we can reimagine and invent them’ (Wenders and Zournazi 2013, 107). In their book, Inventing Peace: a dialogue on perception, Wenders and Zournazi describe that we need a ‘creative revolt to change perceptual habits’ that reinforce separation and violence (107). Peace has a different logic than war, and at the same time, ‘human history shows that violence is deeply embedded in the structures of our cultural imaginations and morality’ (107). Peace education, the educational theory to encourage cultures of peace, has the task to embed peace, solidarity and care into our habits and structures. This does not mean to strive for a superficial harmony, but to provide the fundaments for peaceful societies that are able to engage nonviolently during conflicts (Gruber 2015, 73). We have various pictures of violence but not of peace. Peace seems to be an unknown land, a place of absence or an empty space, however, peace is dynamic and involves various perspectives and images (Hawksley and Mitchell 2020). How can we imagine, invent and create cultures of peace in a violent world? We need to become aware of the peaceful acts and rituals that surround us. It requires being present and having a loving look at the world and all its inhabitants, a look through the eyes of compassion and care.

To present a loving look involves respect and care for all that we encounter and see. It may seem radical or maybe foolish in the midst of chaos or tragedy, but in essence it is this gaze that opens out the freedom to invent, to make choices. And the power to make choices involves imagination, because even when we feel most threatened, most hateful or isolated, there exists the power to invent peace (Wenders and Zournazi 2013, 71-72).

A loving look is not meant as sentimental nor romantic, it is a caring look for the world that does not neglect violence and inequalities but operates within a different logic, one that does not repeat and co-create violence in the name of peace. Peace logic is based on different premises than, for example, a security logic (Wintersteiner and Graf 2015, 19). Now, more than ever, there is a collective longing for peace and a good life for all. At the same time, the big stories of peace seem to have lost their power, and what stays is longing, the longing for peace (Charim 2018).

Already Marcuse (1964) saw imagination as one counterstrategy of ideological domination and one-dimensional thought. Through a caring look and a relational understanding of the world, something new can arise. Peace and peacebuilding are not just skills and knowledge, but also art, a creative process that originates in our imagination. (Lederach 2005). In his book, The Moral Imagination. The Art and Soul of building Peace, Lederach defines moral imagination ‘as the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist’ (Lederach 2005, ix). This is an act of poiesis as a ‘result of the poetry of thinking that links memory and hope, remembrance and utopia, through the embrace of a vulnerable body, which suffers the sorrows of loss and yearns for a better future’ (Mendieta 2017, 15). How can we yearn for a better future und transcend the cycles of violence, and at the same time create real and constructive change in communities? Moral imagination consists or requires four capacities:

the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence (Lederach 2005, 5).

These aspects of moral imagination imply a transformation of dualistic polarities, cycles of violence and respect for complexity, contradictions and ambiguity as aspects of human life, especially during conflicts (35–37). This needs the gifts and qualities of the artists, especially the voice of the poet, to imagine, invent and perceive peace in the ‘lands of violence’ (5) and the courage to take risks and step into the unknown. Peace might seem or feel like something unknown, especially in societies that have lived under violent conflicts for generations. Moral imagination builds on the capacity to perceive things on a deeper and archetypical level, an attentiveness that sees the things behind the immediately visible and creates and gives birth to something new. For this, we must engage in history: complex historical relationships, biographies and social structures, so that we can stay grounded in realism. In grounded realism, genuine change is possible, and this change is more about courage than it is about numbers and controlling measures. This change towards ‘peace is located in the nature and quality of relationships developed with those most feared’ (63). For this, it needs deep insights and understanding about the world that see the whole picture and not just parts of it, which is a rather intuitive act. Moral imagination ‘seeks to connect with the deep intuition that creates the capacity to penetrate and transcend the challenges of violent conflict’ (71).

In his existential ecology of being-in-the-world, Weber (2016) describes that the process of imaginative creation happens within a poetic space that ‘encompasses both material processes and meaning relations, joining them together to a lived experience, which is “felt” or subjective from the inside and “sensuous” or “expressive” from the outside’ (9). The poetic space is life as ‘imagination happening through matter’ (43). The knowledge that arises from the poetic space, from sensual experience, is not discursive but archetypical. Poiesis does not start with text, but with our body, and through our body we experience subjectivity; at the same time, it connects us with all life forms.

To acknowledge the “pattern that connects” means to be entangled in it, to be part in that pattern, and to read what it, other, is like, through what I, self, is like, and viceversa. To be alive means to be weaved into this pattern as part of it, and to be its weaver, at the same time. This is in full contradiction, and still necessary. We can realize this paradox through our embodied identity, which is one form of poiesis (Weber 2016, 82).

The poetic space that allows us to imagine and create something new is important for the process of peacebuilding, because we need to envision new possibilities of relating with each other especially, but not only, during conflicts.

Art is what the human hand touches, shapes, and creates and in turn what touches our deeper sense of being, our experience. The artistic process has this dialectic nature: It arises from human experience and then shapes, gives expression and meaning to, that experience. Peacebuilding has this same artistic quality. It must experience, envision, and give birth to the web of relationships (Lederach 2005, 34).

Art, or the poetic act, strives to create something, to give body to an experience. The process of creating cultures of peace is not only intellectual, but needs the qualities of the artist.

In more general terms I equally perceive the prevalent topics of our discipline-peace, conflict, violence, transformation- to be inadequately captured by methods that only intellectualize. I propose that lived experience with all those topics is of a rather different nature than what is described in most textbooks of our discipline. As lived experience, these topics concern body, heart, mind, soul and spirit (Koppensteiner 2018, 60).

The artistic act of imagining and inventing peace is embodied and relational, and asks us for various ways of knowing and being in the world.

Knowledge and ethics from heart and breath- a sensible and relational ontology

I don’t think it’s an ontology we need, but a desmology –

in Greek desmos means connection, or link.

The word is used in medicine, but that doesn’t concern us here.

What interests me is not so much the state of things

but the relations between them. I’ve concerned myself

with nothing but relations for my whole life.

Relations come before being. Just as Jean- Paul Sartre

said that ‘essence precedes existence’, I say that

relationships come before being.

Michel Serres

Knowing itself remains partial and

deformed if we do not develop and practice an epistemology

of love instead of an epistemology of separation.

Arthur Zajonc

As described above, the imaginal might be the sphere for shaping reality and experience, for imagining and inventing. Corbin (1972) describes the imaginal, or mundus imaginalis, within an independent ontological status that can be perceived and accessed within metaphors. The imaginal is not the imaginary, which is contrasted with the real, but is another form of reality or another order within reality, an intermediate world between the sensible and the intellectual. Imagination is the forming of image and metaphor, it is another form and expression of knowledge. ‘Metaphoric imagination creates images based on information that originates in imaginal reality. These are not fantasy images but represent an imaginal reality’ (Poulson 2011, 181). The sphere of the imaginal is especially the sphere of the heart, the sensible in combination with body and mind. The sensibility of the heart as the feeling center can perceive the imaginal, the subtle and metaphorical. ‘This imaginational intelligence resides in the heart; “intelligence of the heart” connotes a simultaneous knowing and loving by means of imagining’ (Hillman 1981, 7).

The pathetic heart is a responsive presence to things, a response-able presence, a presence that is able-to-respond because it has listened. In this respect, the pathetic heart is an ethical way of knowing the world and being in it, a way of knowing and being, which in being response-able is rooted in obedience to its ties to nature, unlike mind, which has broken that connection (Romanyshyn 2002, 164).

The thought of the heart is thinking in images, and ‘if we speak from the heart we must speak imaginatively’ (Hillman 1981, 4). The peacebuilder that can speak from the heart is the artist who allows for new ways of imagining and relating.

Knowing through heart is affective and empathic knowing that is based on the ‘premises that the human being is not a self-contained and stable subject that is sealed off from an outside world of objects, but much rather is a contact boundary at work with interpersonal, intrapersonal and transpersonal aspects (Koppensteiner 2018, 69).

The knowledge that arises from the heart also comes from a yearning to understand something deeply and intuitively. The word intuitus means direct perception of knowledge in Latin. It allows for a direct way of knowing prior to conceptual knowing. Intuitive knowledge shows itself, e.g., through image, feeling, sensations and sounds, and is accompanied by feelings of coherence and meaningfulness that involve the entire being (Anderson 2011, 19–21). ‘Intuitions seem to see beneath the surface of things and experience directly the force of love within every thing’ (Anderson 2011, 22).

Through the tears of the heart, we begin to see that knowing is about loving and not about power, and that its practice requires a surrender of oneself to what one wishes to know, a surrender that places oneself in intimate proximity with the desired other, and not at a distance that allows dominance and control. In this way of knowing, we know as we let ourselves be known. Although this way of knowing and being is neither about the empiricism of facts nor the logic of reason, it is a legitimate way of knowing the world and being in it. It is a gnosis familiar to the artist and the lover, the mystic and the poet, childhood and madness (Romanyshyn 2002, 156).

Irigaray was one of the first philosophers, in particular, one of the first female philosophers, who described the philosophical and ethical importance of breath and an ethics of love to meet each other in difference. In her work, The Forgetting of Air, Irigaray (1999) explores the forgotten breath in Western philosophy, and in the same year created an ontology of breath. She approaches body and breath through a dialogue of so-called Eastern and Western philosophy. For her, breathing is the first autonomous gesture of living beings, and being in the world means to inhale and exhale. An ethics of breathing is a ‘restored field of intersubjectivity’ (Škof 2015, 2). Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas are essential authors to discover intersubjectivity; for them, subjectivity is essentially intersubjectivity, and being a self means to encounter the other. Both of them focus on intersubjectivity – Lévinas emphasizes ethics, and Merleau-Ponty emphasizes embodiment (Bahler 2016, 3). Schelling and Feuerbach had a great influence on Irigaray, and love, breath, imagination and art had important implications for both of their philosophies. For Feuerbach, being is love and sensation. Schelling describes love as Hauch, which can be translated as air or a cosmic breath that connects all living beings. Breath is the first emergence of an ethical proximity, a relationship between interiority and exteriority, and the communion of all living embodied life. Breathing is the most intimate act and connects us with the whole world, Mitwelt. It plays a role in various cultures and traditions (e.g., Yoga), but was almost forgotten in the so-called Western philosophies. Škof (2015) asks the important question: why do we still forget to breathe in philosophy? Philosophers who only think and do not breathe miss an important aspect of life. Maybe Descartes forgot about breath and an ontological split was created that allowed for an abstract analysis of so-called objects. Within this logic, everything alive (people, animal, nature, world) could be portrayed as object and therefore within hierarchical and discriminating theories that lead to various forms of violence, such as colonialism, genocide, epistemicide and the transformation of nature (Brunner 2020, 48). Violence is relational and breaking violence requires an understanding that we are interconnected: ‘Who we have been, are, and will be emerges and shapes itself in a context of relational interdependency’ (Lederach 2005, 35).

Can a philosophy of breathing remind us about our relational interdependency, a relational peace, the interconnectedness of all living beings including our own body and the world? Dietrich (2012) collected various etymological meanings of the word peace from peace students all over the world. He cited a student from Burkina Faso who explained that in his language the word peace means fresh air:

Because astonishment about ‘fresh air’ was followed by enthusiasm about the beauty of the word: Can there be a better way to experience peace than breathing fresh air? Is breathing in itself not the most fundamental and indispensable act of all beings, for themselves and yet in necessary relation to each other, and thus the most alive measurement for peaces as such? Do we not take the whole Mitwelt into ourselves each time we breathe in? Do we not release something from our deepest inside, something very intimate and authentic, into the environment each time we breathe out? (Dietrich 2012, 3).

We need a shift from a worldview of analytical thinking of separable discrete objects that are detached from oneself and others to an understanding of interconnectedness and relationships:

We need to listen to discussions in ecological ethics about the need for relational ontology, and we can pull its strings to culture and peace. We moderns or ‘Liquid’ moderns, as Zygmunt Bauman would call us, need to change our ontology, in other words, our mode of being and doing. We need to stop thinking about ourselves as isolated and separated entities, and rather view our relation with the outer world as existing interdependently (Atay 2018, 4).

A relational and embodied ontology that understands life as interconnected can lead to an ethic of care and non-violence. Irigaray (2008) describes that we have the task to create cultures of peace and an ethics of otherness that is non-violent and based on the gestures of hospitality. Breath directs back to the body, to an embodied ethics of difference including dignity and respect for all living beings. (Škof 2015).

An ethics of care or sensibility is not something private or individual, but a political act). Baquero Torres (2019) describes an ethic of care referring to Gilligan’s’s (1982) approach of relationality and Lévinas’ (1983) ethic of the other. An ethic of care builds on empathy. The ability to understand and feel another's needs requires an embodied presence and an openness to engage and really meet the other person through dialogue and self- reflection. Emotions are central for these processes and they are not individual, but relational, collective and political (Ahmed 2004; Nussbaum 2013). This is not to say that there are not structural forms of violence, such as inequality, that need ‘a transformation in material conditions, in power structures of domination and exploitation, which are all interconnected’ (Atay 2018, 7). The transformation in material conditions and violent structures goes hand in hand with an ethic of care. The ways in which relationships develop are crucial, not only, but especially, during conflicts. Will they move towards blame, violence and the victory over the other or towards mutual respect, trust, dignity and vulnerability? Lederach’s working definition of constructive social change describes this:

the pursuit of moving relationships from those defined by fear, mutual recrimination, and violence toward those characterized by love, mutual respect, and proactive engagement. Constructive social change seeks to change the flow of human interaction in social conflict from cycles of destructive relational violence toward cycles of relational dignity and respectful engagement. The flows of fear destroy. Those of love edify. That is the challenge: how to move from that which destroys toward that which builds. I call this constructive social change. (Lederach 2005, 42-43).

An ethic of care builds on the ability to understand and feel another person, and is described by Edith Stein ([1917] 2008) as Einfühlung. She describes Einfühlung, empathy, as a way to empathize and feel oneself in the experience of another being. This sensual and emotional empathy is not merely a perception, but an experience that is led by foreign experience through the sensations of the living body (Stein [1917] 2008). Empathy is an experience of another person’s experience ‘in an unmediated way, but dissimilar to perception and similar to other forms of experiences such as imagination, in that the meaning content of the experience is not given directly to the empathizer’ (Svenaeus 2018, 743).

The processes of inventing, imagining and empathizing are connected through the sensibility of mind, heart and body, and through their interplay they allow the possibility of perceiving more deeply, feeling connected with others, and thus, being sensitive to the needs of oneself and others.

Sensual empathy is a process of recognition and understanding that takes place on the level of embodied existence when one lived body feels and perceives the presence of another lived body and follows its experiences through in a spontaneous manner (Svenaeus 2018, 748).

Also, within dialogues, we can create a field of resonance and empathy. Martin Buber (2004) describes a ‘genuine dialogue’ (18) in which we experience the other and the world, and we relate to each other and at the same time experience the world. ‘If peace is being with the world and others, how might we consider this “withness” as an empirical question and a tool for change?’ (Wenders and Zournazi 2013, 70). For Buber, the awareness of the sacredness of the world and others leads to genuine responsibility.

Buber`s account of becoming aware is to observe, and to observe has a special function in the sense of justice and equality, since to observe involves a whole of an experience, not just getting stuck in the fragments of what we see, our limited vision. Etymologically speaking, observe contains the word to serve; service in this light is not exploitation, but humility and respect. Since we are concerned with inventing peace, we might say the service to reality is the only true function of peace (Wenders and Zournazi 2013, 70).

Observation in Buber`s understanding is meant as a whole experience – the etymological root of whole is holy. The alienated experience is the I–it relation; living beings are turned into objects. Alienation (Entfremdung) refers to a state of unrelated relationship in which subject and world are unconnected. The world is perceived as an inanimate place without feeling or sensitivity, so it is easy to accept violent structures and suffering.

Rosa (2018) calls the connection and relationship to the world resonance. The relationality of human life, especially within conflicts, makes resonance an important principle for a relational peace philosophy (Dietrich 2018). Resonance is a form of relatedness that is not lead by domination or utility, but through openness, genuine interest and embodied being. The capability of sensing oneself, the other and the world is crucial for the experience of resonance. Resonance is a process or moment in which we are affected and touched by the world, a relational endeavor, but not an echo (Rosa 2018). The philosophical thoughts about a poiesis of peace build on imagination, a relational ontology and an ethic of care have implications for peace education.

A poiesis of peace – implications for peace education

The future we want needs to be invented,

otherwise we will get one we don´t want.

Joseph Beuys

We must dare, in the full sense of the word,

to speak of love without fear of being called

ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific,

if not antiscientific … we study, we learn, we

teach we know with our entire body.

Paulo Freire

The epistemology of art is empathy.

David Swanger

In this part, the implications for peace education are highlighted. The term poiesis of peace, as a processual making of peace, highlights the previously mentioned topics of imagining, inventing and creating cultures of peace. Within peace education the term learning peace highlights the processual making of peace and the possibility to educate for constructive conflict transformation and non-violent societies (Gruber 2015, 61–62). In earlier times, for example in the fifth century, the poets and artists were the most important ethical teachers in the society. Their wisdom was crucial for important human matters (Nussbaum 2001, 124).

The arts have the capacity to engage us on a visceral level, accessing, creating and reinforcing beliefs and prejudices, desires and repulsions. Their ability to tap into and awaken our deepest fears and desires in ways that can, for better or worse, bypass our normal and more reflective ways of thinking and acting, serves to illustrate the degree to which our image of ourselves as self-possessed and rational is only partially accurate. The potential of the arts, as well as their danger, lies in their ability to touch us, as Levertov puts it, at “the soul’s well”, at a depth of ourselves not entirely accessible to us (Hawksley and Mitchell 2020, 12).

The work of the poets and artists touch the senses and thus, go deeper than words. ‘We are spellbound by words. However, if we are to awaken and engage the moral imagination, we necessarily must engage the fuller range of senses, which includes but goes beyond the world of words’ (Lederach 2005, 109). The art of moral imagination, the invention of peace based on a relational ontology, asks for presence, sharp senses for our world/Mitwelt and deep listening skills, which means listening for metaphors.

Yet the ecstatic epiphany of the artist invites us to sense and “touch” the ineffable and, no small irony, it is that encounter with what some describe as “the eternal” that sets us on the long journey back to our full humanity. Enduring peace among longtime enemies cannot be built through a formal process alone; a change of heart and a renewal of hope is necessary. Such interior transformations can only unfold in the depths of the soul. And such depths are plumbed most creatively and thus most powerfully in and through the arts (Appleby 2020, 443).

For this, we need to educate and allow various ways of knowing. Further, as teachers, facilitators and researchers, we need ‘a certain relational attitude and quality of being in the world. It is carried by a basic respect and empathy towards the world and all its manifestations’ (Koppensteiner 2018, 66–67). Rogers (1975) describes the process and quality of empathy as the ability to perceive the internal frame of the other, meaning and emotion, as if one were the other person, but being aware of the as if condition. Empathy, congruence, presence and acceptance are key qualities for him in relating with other living beings (Rogers 1995).

For these qualities in teaching and being, we need what York and Kasl (2006) call expressive ways of knowing. We always know more than we can say, and for whole person-learning experiences we have to involve expressive ways of knowing. Expressive ways of knowing refers to the intuitive grasp of ‘what [people] perceive through images, body, sensation, and imagination’ (York and Kasl 2006, 43). Based on Heron’s (1992) conceptualization of experiential, presentational, propositional and practical ways of knowing, the experiential and presentational ways of knowing are more connected with the subconscious and affective modes. In this sphere, the intuitive grasp of imaginal patterns draws out emotions, empathy and resonance. The traditional educational realm involves propositional and practical modes of knowing. Propositional ways of knowing are built on the rules of logic and evidence, which are expressed verbally and numerically. The practical way of knowing manifests in the ability to exercise a skill. Presentational knowing is the bridge between experiential and propositional knowing, and ‘an intuitive grasping of pattern in perceptual elements’ (York and Kasl 2006, 48).

We need presentational knowing and the qualities of the artist and poet, to create something new, to imagine peace and positive social change. This means to work with images, awareness, stories, theatre, paintings, music, movies, and all tools that allow an engagement with senses and the possibility to feel and empathize. Furthermore, to work holistically as educators we also have to be grounded in our emotional lives (York and Kasl 2006, 50). An educational approach that encourages the skills of the artist, ‘requires that we open a space for the development of the moral imagination, the capacity to recognize patterns and relational contexts yet think beyond the repetition of what already exists’ (Lederach 2005, 124). This way of learning fosters curiosity and focuses on how things are connected , ‘imagines both the past and the future and provides space for the narrative voice to create. As such, the art of imaging the past that lies before us holds the deep belief that the creative act is possible’ (149). Imagining is a process that connects intellect and sensibility/sensitivity.  That is to say that to open up such creative spaces for imagination, we, as teachers, educators, facilitators, have to enter the classroom also as sensitive and embodied beings.

Indeed, if we enter any classroom unknowingly ensconced within the Cartesian dream, not only does imagination wither, it also stays outside the door where the body is left behind. Education then becomes a matter of imparting information by a teacher-as-cogito, disembodied and disconnected from a feeling and passionate connection to his/her words’ (Romanyshyn 2012, 101).

We have to allow ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity, even if it is sometimes messy. This also includes vulnerability, which is, as Brantmeier and McKenna (2020) describe in their book, Pedagogy of Vulnerability, ‘a critique of sterile, fragmented, and disconnected learning-learning without the whole person-emotions, body, mind, and spirit’ (Brantmeier and McKenna 2020, 2). Creating an ethics of caring and empathy also needs spaces where people are allowed to show their vulnerabilities, not randomly, but grounded in experience, without being judged or taken advantage of. This is especially crucial for peace education (25).

In her dialogue with Kester on peace education, Cremin (2020) asks for alternative imaginaries that give space for care, affect and embodiment in education.

In this respect, my current teaching and research agenda emphasizes higher educational efforts to denationalize, decolonize, and de-epistemologize peace-building education through efforts towards transnational, transrational, and transformational education. Vulnerable pedagogy is embedded within this framework as I draw on narrative and experience-my own and others-to challenge ethnocentrism, neoliberalism, and other systemic challenges of our times. It is, for me, the vulnerable pedagogy of the personal, lived experience rooted in context, that provides the entry point into deeply transformative inquiry. This keeps peace work grounded and at the same time does not limit peace building to any set of experiences or hegemonic norms, because it begins with the inquirer’s ontological positions’ (Cremin and Kester 2020, 28).

Within peace education, we need the facts, the grounded realism, critical thinking, and knowledge about history, politics and the world, with all its inequalities and structural violence (Noddings 2012). We have to open up spaces for the voices of marginalized groups to be heard. At the same time, we need to create spaces of care, openness and creativity with laughter and connection (Cremin and Kester 2020, 32). Critical pedagogy and the role of emotion and affect in learning have to go hand in hand. It is not enough to only teach heads, as has been already criticized by Paulo Freire (2000) with the banking concept of education. Further, in peace education we can encourage learners to explore peace and conflict in themselves. Students’ experiences and narratives are valid forms of knowledge (Cremin, Echavarría, and Kester 2018, 297–300). The universalist understanding of an absolute objective rational knowledge has to loosen according to narratives of human experiences and sensual perception (Meyer-Drawe 2020, 13).

Peterlini (2020) highlights the discrepancies of a pedagogy that is only built on cognitively understanding a subject and a pedagogy that also gives space to sensual and affective perception. Thus, the ability as a teacher to allow for moments of just perceiving without interpreting can be an important task to gain new insights (8–9). Perception and awareness are itself pedagogical practices that allow for a deeper connection and understanding. Art and artistic methods can encourage sensual perception and various forms of knowing. In aesthetic experience, a person is receptive in perceiving phenomena in a sensory and emotive way and productive in creating his or her own (Bresler 2013). Accordingly, art is both a form of expression and a form of cognition encouraging imagination and empathy. Claxton (2015) describes imagination as a process, in which body and mind are linked. In the brain imagination and empathy activate the same area (163). Empathy is the capacity to see through another’s eyes and art is one way to make this as if perspective possible. Especially during conflicts on an interpersonal or societal level there is the tendency to create barriers between ourselves and the other. Also, our ability to imagine what the other person experiences shuts down. The arts are one way

to bear witness to the costs of conflict, to reconnect people to the force of their compassionate (or moral) imagination, and reawaken empathy—the ability to imagine the experience and suffering of others, and the ability to reach across the lines of conflict in order to engage with it. (Hawksley and Mitchell 2020, 24-25).

In their book Aesthetics, Empathy and Education, White and Costantino (2013) created a collection on aesthetic educational experiences in relation to empathy. Bresler (2013), for example, uses the engagement with artwork to let students associate and wonder about the intents and perspectives of the artist to encourage empathic understanding. Barrett (2013) uses paintings like Frederic Remington’s painting Rounded-Up and asks students to write fictional narratives about the art piece out of different perspectives like for example, the man, the horse or the bush in the painting. Bube (2020) applies the phenomenological educational approach to visual art which she calls embodied art reflection. She uses the concrete experience of unusual artwork as a possibility to create disruptive moments that may create new perspectives in the perceiver by breaking usual patterns of perception and therefore habits of thinking. Diamond (2013), who works with Theatre for Living, inspired by Theatre of the Oppressed, creates spaces to transform violent patterns and to allow for new imaginaries within communities. He uses theatre as an approach to make patterns and dynamics of the community visible and people can try out new ways of engaging. He describes the artist as the one who breaks rules, shows new ways and disturbs frozen patterns that do not serve the community any more. Anjarwati and Trimble (2014) describe storytelling as a means for peace education that can elicit transformative action to envision peaceful futures. People can express themselves through stories and the stories of people can create resonance and affective spaces through images. Tjersland (2019) highlights the potentials of the dancing body in peace education from a transrational perspective. She explores the conscious dance and movement practice Open Floor as a possibility for and experiences of interconnectedness. These are just a few examples of arts-based approaches in peace education.

Conclusion

This theoretical paper is an attempt to contribute with the so-called qualities of the artist to peace education. The imaginative qualities of the artist, to hold tension creatively together, to create moments of perspective change, empathy, utopia and hope are crucial to create cultures of peace. The potential of sensitivity that provides the basis for imagination and empathy is often neglected in educational setting and spaces. At the same time, the need for embodied pedagogies of interdependence, care and vulnerability becomes stronger. Especially in peace education, we want to provide ethical frames. The critique on the dominant system and unequal structures is important, but not enough to create cultures of peace. The sensual and imaginative qualities of the artist can bring us in touch with the world and activate empathy and a sense of connectedness. Creating experiences to see through another’s eyes is an important task for peace education. As outlined in the article, art and artistic methods have the potential to encourage various ways of knowing (imaginative, intuitive, expressive, affective and embodied) which make an as if perspective possible. The importance of relationality and intersubjectivity was only marginally mentioned but should be worth of further research in peace studies and peace education.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and thank my supervisor Hans Karl Peterlini for his support and inspirational insights into perception and phenomenology. I also wish to thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their meaningful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniela Lehner

Daniela Lehner, MSc is a doctoral assistant at the Centre for Peace Research and Peace Education, Department of Educational Science at Klagenfurt University in Austria. Her research focuses on transformative learning processes, peace education and pedagogies of care and empathy. She is especially interested in embodied, affective and arts-based approaches in education and peace education.