The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.
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This edition first published 2016
© 2016 Emma Williams
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Cover image: Ismo Jokiaho, Dangling, oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm, 2009. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
For a long time now, all too long, thinking has been stranded on dry land. Can then the effort to return thinking to its element be called ‘irrationalism’?
(Heidegger, 2010 [1947], p. 219)
To say that you are writing a book about thinking, or that thinking is the focus of your research, is apt to produce some puzzlement. The polite smile momentarily freezes. ‘Oh, thinking, you say? How interesting. Such a rich topic…’ And then the conversation moves discreetly on. Now if you say that you are studying critical thinking or the development of thinking skills, or that you are interested in techniques that help us think better – all these come within a more familiar range. After all, isn’t critical thinking just what is needed today? Spotting the flaw in the argument, seeing through all that propaganda and spin, being able to think through what you are doing with your life and so properly planning your career, finances, relationships, and properly managing your emotions … – yes, these things surely make sense. And doesn’t the pace of change today mean that we need people who can adapt to different roles and pick up new skills, because they have developed the kind of critical thinking that any subject needs and the transferable skill set that equips them for a range of roles and responsibilities? When it comes to education itself, from preschool to postgraduate research, wouldn’t children progress much more quickly, and doctoral students complete sooner, if only we had a clear diagnosis of their preferred learning styles and they had the meta-learning to see them through? Yes, all this makes good sense. But thinking by itself? What can research into that be about? After all, isn’t all philosophy thinking, and all research thinking anyway? What can this be about?
Yet one of philosophy’s achievements is surely to have paid attention to aspects of experience that have come to be taken for granted – taken for granted perhaps because they are too much in the background or too pervasive an aspect of our condition. In any case it is not as if thinking has not been a subject for philosophers, from Socrates to Hegel, to Michael Dummett and Gilles Deleuze. In a sense Descartes’ thought experiment is an experiment in the nature of thought, and its orientation for much of the philosophy that followed, and for much of Western thinking that followed in its train, is scarcely to be denied. Moreover, when Gilbert Ryle identified the ‘ghost in the machine’, he was articulating in a memorable English phrase a broader range of expression that traversed German and French and American philosophical traditions, at the least, and that was anti-Cartesian in substance and style. In Emma Williams’ The Ways We Think, Ryle’s insights are taken up in ways that reveal rich paths of connection, sometimes adjacent, perhaps meandering paths that take the reader through the work of Ryle’s contemporary at Oxford, J.L. Austin, and then along other intertwining paths into the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. The paths sometimes diverge, and some of them prove to be dead ends. But the journey along them, along this one and then that, as it gradually comes into view or crosses the place where you are walking, reveals contours in the landscape of thinking that might otherwise be too quickly passed by.
Ryle’s identification of the ‘intellectualist legend’ coincided with a time when the still relatively new discipline of psychology was increasing its influence, a time when Ludwig Wittgenstein could complain, on the last page of the Philosophical Investigations, of its mix of ‘experimental methods and conceptual confusion’: ‘The existence of the experimental method’, he wrote, ‘makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.’ It seems unlikely that Wittgenstein’s admonitions here have very much held back the advance of the subject. Indeed its influence has percolated through society in multiple ways. Although this has surely brought benefits of divers kinds, it has also led to an entrenchment in some aspects of life of those problems against which Ryle’s arguments, and Wittgenstein’s innumerable examples, were levelled.
That entrenchment is painfully present in much contemporary thinking about education, evident in innovations such as BrainGym, in simplistic conceptions of thinking skills, and in new incarnations of the figure of ‘the learner’, whose technicism quite displaces any more rounded conception of the person. It is a factor also in contemporary assessment regimes and the performative culture in which they thrive: such assessment practices in turn cast their influence back, as it were, on the content of the curricula and the teaching through which students prepare to be tested, with the reductiveness of a new behaviourism. That all this surreptitiously imparts a certain conception of what thinking is seems to go without saying. In some countries, there is now a generation of teachers who themselves have never known anything different. Now surely that calls for thought.
In fact, it calls for thought about the nature of thinking, and that is exactly what this book provides. The Ways We Think moves beyond the current predominant approaches to ’thinking education‘ evidenced in educational policy, practice, and research, showing how severely restricted these are in their scope – restricted by a particular, limited conception of both the experience of thinking and the human being who thinks. Such ways of thinking derive from and reinforce an abstracted, disengaged conception of the human being. They perpetuate a representational, intellectualised image of thought itself. The more adequate conception of thinking for education to which Williams’ argument adroitly leads us involves an insight gained through her careful reading of supposedly disparate texts: that, for all the diversity of the traditions that Ryle, Heidegger, Austin, and Derrida represent, their shared commitment is to do justice to the ways we think. Williams deftly brings to light the way that these thinkers, each in his own way, demonstrate that human thought does not consist in the abstracted, self-sufficient activity of the ‘thinking subject’, that human subjectivity is, on the contrary, a concrete, mediated, and conditioned affair. It is recognition of this kind that leads the reader from ‘the straits of reason to the possibilities of thought’. These words from the book’s subtitle point to a release from a narrowly constrained conception of reason, which in the text that follows is sometimes characterised as ‘rationalism’, to a richer realisation of reason, in which the nature of signs, so essential to the meaningfulness of human life and the world, is appreciated. Exploring these ‘possibilities’ of human thought, possibilities inherent in the very structure of meaning, reveals what makes thought happen and what can and does happen when we think.
It is one of the achievements of this highly original text in respect of philosophy that it shuns any simplistic divide between analytical and continental thought. Rather, it follows the argument where it leads. Its insistence on this, in conjunction with the precision, fluency and elegance of the writing, achieves a clarity of thought that often escapes philosophical styles that flaunt the name and a greater rigour than the self-consciously muscular, rationalistic thought that Williams sets out to confront. It is one of the book’s achievements in respect of education that it takes seriously what is taken to be thinking in education and reveals the impoverishment that this often enshrines. It reveals possibilities of improved practice by showing us how we might think better, and how we might better think of thinking.
To borrow a line from Heidegger, ‘in giving thanks, the heart gives thought to what it has and what it is’. So here, before Denken, is some appropriate Danken.
This work grew out of my doctoral thesis and, first and foremost, my thanks must go to my supervisor, Paul Standish. I am hugely grateful for his shared vision on my topic and for the careful consideration he gave to my writing throughout. Our discussions helped me to see when my ideas could be taken that little bit further, and I am sure that any value this book has would have been lesser without his advice and guidance.
I wrote the chapters that comprise this book whilst working as philosopher-in-residence at Rugby School, and there could not have been a more enjoyable environment to be in. I am grateful to the (then) Headmaster, Patrick Derham, who allowed me time away from school to attend conferences and seminars when needed. My thanks also go to John Taylor for his early encouragement to pursue research in philosophy and education. I am also greatly indebted to Jonathan Smith and Andrew Fletcher: the conversations of the “Rugby Circle” were a constant source of inspiration throughout this project and will, I am sure, continue to be so well into the future.
I am grateful to those who have commented on my work at conferences, seminars, and other occasions: in particular, Michael Hand for his help in the early stages of my doctoral project and Richard Smith for his thoughtful feedback on my thesis. I am grateful to Jacqueline Scott at Wiley-Blackwell for her help with bringing this book to print and to Simon Glendinning for kindly agreeing to endorse it. Finally, I am grateful to my family and my husband, Farshad Mashoof, for the happy distractions they have given me along the way.