Potentialism and the experience of the new

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that potentialism is uniquely able to articulate the value of educational practices (such as philosophy with children, and study) that lack the kind of directionality commonly associated with educational activities. It does so by operating with radically different assumptions about the nature and value of education – assumptions that can be derived from the basic premise of progressive education that education needs to be rooted in experience. I follow here a line of thought that leads from Dewey’s (broadly scientific) notion of experience aimed at new and better experiences, to Ivan Illich’s emphasis on the experience of the new, to Gert Biesta’s idea that education needs to allow students to bring something new into the world, to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’ emphasis on the experience of the possibility of the new. Finally, drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Tyson E. Lewis, I show how a potentialist notion of experience operates with a different temporality, enabling us to think of the experience of the potentiality of the new as such as what accounts for the educational value of non-directional practices – not only in spite of, but because of their lack of directionality.

Keywords:

• Potentialism
• philosophy with children
• Gert Biesta
• Giorgio Agamben
• Jan Masschelein

Notes

1. While my practice includes some of the procedural features of the original Philosophy for Children-approach (e.g. Lipman et al. 1980; Lipman 2003), it differs from the original P4C-approach in that it does not see the development of thinking skills and reasonableness as what accounts for the unique value of the practice. This approach has been conceptualized elsewhere as ‘Philosophy for Infancy’ (e.g. Jasinski and Lewis 2015).

2. He writes, for example, that ‘scientific method provides a working pattern of the way in which and the conditions under which experiences are used to lead ever onward and outward’ (1997, 88). And ‘The methods of science also point the way to the measures and policies by means of which a better social order can be brought into existence’ (ibid., 81).

3. While Dewey might be right, when he writes that ‘It is not true that organization is a principle foreign to experience,’ adding: ‘Otherwise experience would be so dispersive as to be chaotic’ (1997, 82), it doesn’t follow that the idea of experience implies a principle of a movement toward an increasingly better and more orderly arrangement of ideas, whether such movement is conceived in scientific terms, or otherwise.

4. See also Arendt, for whom education is about allowing for the ‘new and revolutionary in every child’ (2006, 189) to be brought in to the world, with the difference that Arendt places the emphasis on new ways of acting, of ‘undertaking something new’ (ibid., 193), whereas Biesta emphasizes new ways of speaking.

5. For Agamben, the problem with equating experience with scientific experience, is that, ‘the search for the “new” does not appear as the search for a new object of experience; instead, it implies an eclipse and a suspension of experience. New is what cannot be experienced, because it lies “in the depths of the unknown”: the Kantian thing-in-itself, the inexperiencible as such’ (2007, 47, 48).

6. This also means that experience, qua infancy, is not only a zone of indistinguishability between language and not language, but also between the old (immanence) and the new (transcendence). In The Time That Remains, Agamben writes: ‘In this way, the messianic vocation is a movement of immanence, or, if one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernibility between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world’ (2005, 25).

7. See Lewis’s paper in this volume for a more elaborate discussion of the connections between ‘less than’ and the studious self.