Repetition makes Difference: thinking the apprenticeship of philosophy

Abstract

What we mean to do in this Symposium is to think about education by means of the concept of ‘potentiality’ in contrast to the logic of ‘actualisation’ which is prevailing in education today. In this paper, I try to think out loud through a particular way of teaching philosophy that may fit in with a ‘potentialism’ based approach, as we have tentatively called it. In Spain, philosophy is part of the secondary education curriculum. At first glance, it might seem a blessing to live in a country that deems that philosophy should have an important role in a young person’s education nevertheless, the students are usually quite lost. Students receive philosophy as a collection of lofty discourses, therefore philosophy is reduced to ‘Nietzsche said …’, ‘Aristotle said …’, thereby deactivating the potentiality of their ideas. In the following, I will argue how I believe we can reactivate the potentiality of philosophy, and how we can transpose this gesture to the teaching of philosophy at the secondary education level.

Keywords:

• Apprenticeship
• philosophy
• potentiality
• Agamben
• Deleuze

Notes

1. I would like to thank SunInn Yun and Paul Standish for their sharp remark on the way I draw on the verb ‘deactivate’ in this contribution. This has challenged me to clarify what I mean by saying ‘deactivating’ and ‘activating’. I am not using the metaphor of a machine stopping or starting up. Instead, I am referring to the conceptual couple potentiality-actuality, following Aristotle’s account of this in his Metaphysics. According to Aristotle, potentiality is the principle of motion, which is in another thing than the thing moved, or in the same thing qua other, which means that something potential becomes active either by moving or being moved (1019a 15). Aristotle (1998, 258) makes use of this conceptual couple to explain motion: according to him, potentiality always refers to actuality, and so we cannot think both terms separately.

When Philosophy is prevented from ‘moving’ something or someone, or from being moved (in other directions), it is as if its potentiality were doomed to remain potential, which is unfortunate when we try to teach philosophy. This claim may sound strange in this context, given that the other contributors to the symposium argue that potentiality ‘as such’ – that is, cut from its potentiality (in Aristotle’s account, potentiality doesnt pass over into any actuality) – is in itself an educative experience. Nonetheless, I think that the other contributors and I are interested the same: the interruption of the path leading from a certain potentiality to a certain actuality. The difference might be that, whereas they focus on a certain moment of this process (the interruption itself), I am trying to think the next step, viz. how to help potentiality taking new/other directions.

2. This is my own translation.

3. This is my own translation.