MBTAPHIMSOPHY Vol. 7, Nos. 3 and 4, July/October 1976

INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND THE TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY

WILLIAM GALLACHER

I. The Conflicting Demands of Philosophy and Common Sense Ought we to assume that our students are naturally disposed

toward the independent thinking we expect in courses in the humanities? Perhaps we should take seriously William James’ reticence about lecturing on philosophy, when he wrote: “I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means.”‘

I believe that students do begin philosophy with preformed positions on the gods, on ethical imperatives, on politics, which are in many cases conventionalistic, egocentric, and light on general principles. In a sense they are disposed to philosophize, but only within the limits of their systems. Safety is not abandoned without resistance.

Whitehead has described philosophy as a continual assault on the boundaries of common sense, replacing received answers with new questions. Unlike positive science, it grows not by steady accumulation but by imaginative leaps beyond the security of current ideology, whether in metaphysics, politics, religion or ethics. Attention to the fact that our discipline de- mands abandonment of heretofore secure anchors for thought may make us more sensitive to the conflicts which introductory courses necessarily generate.

Whatever its other advantages, the pure lecture method has a tendency to seal us off from this, at least until the final exami- nation or course evaluation. Even then, the reassurance that philosophy is not really for everyone is available. A more pro- ductive course would be to allow in our course planning for the fact that our expectations oppose almost every student’s idiosyncratic version of common sense. If the pathway out of safety is more carefully conducted, we may save our students

1William James, “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy”, in Pragmatism (New York: Meridian Books, 19551, p. 17.

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INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 3 17 the trouble of building defences against it, such as the belief that the subject is too difficult, boring, or irrelevant.

Philosophy itself is no stranger to the contrasting claims of custom and disinterested thought. Hume, for example, con- cludes “Of Skepticism with Regard to the Senses” with:

‘Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our under- standing or senses; and we but expose them farther when we endeavor to justify them in that manner. As the skeptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on these subjects, it always encreases, the farther we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or conformity with it. Carelessness and inattention alone can afford us any remedy.’

Speculation strains at our anchors. We cannot assume that the neophyte has a tolerance for this which matches our own. James knew the caution with which a man faces a novel idea: “The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modify- ing his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conserva- tives.”s

In the area of ‘what life honestly and deeply means,’ the student is partly iconoclastic, partly conformist, toward his un- reflective experience. Egocentrism and its overcoming on the level of ideas has its analogue in the earlier phase of emotional self-definition around physical puberty. It would be surprising if the latter task were approached with unqualified zest. But education is neither sheer entertainment nor group therapy. It is difficult to steer one’s course toward the cognitive goals of the course and also to maintain a sensitivity to the dimension I have suggested here, but it is not impossible, as I hope to illustrate. First, I would like to discuss some aspects of White- head’s theory of mental activity which have relevance to the issues I have raised.

11. Whiteheads Understanding of the Learning Process In The Aims of Education, Whitehead rejects the notion that

the student can be viewed as a passive information processer : “It must never be forgotten that education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk. Such a simile is entirely inapplic-

aDavid Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Selby-Bigge (London:

3William James, “What Pragmatism Means”, in Pragmatism, p. 50. MPH K

Oxford, 1968), p. 218.

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able.”“ Articles will remain in a trunk until unpacked, whereas ideas must be either integrated into the student’s experiential complex or rejected. The annoying comparison by students of the examination process with regurgitation comes to mind here. More positively, Whitehead compares education to the asshila. tion of food by a living organism. Unfortunately we sometimes nod approval of the alimentary model but test for retention rather than absorption.

But if we are not filling inert receptacles with articles, what is our function? It is easy to see that the model of the mind as a dead instrument, the basis of a view of education which empha- sizes information-transmission, is far from Whitehead’s view. His positive doctrine in this area, however, imposes great con- ceptual demands. Mentality is to be viewed not as an object but as an activity, more technically, as a series of occasions of experience characterized by a high degree of departure from habit. My ‘self’ is a series of such experiences, a thread of self- realization, each occasion with its direct memory of its past and anticipation of the future.

My claim of enduring personal identity is more properly validated in the continuity of my bodily experiences than in my conscious processes, for these are less law-like, more free. In Process and Reality, the mind is described as a thread of hap- penings shaken by its private intensities, whose sole use to the body is its vivid originality of response.’ Mental experience contains in itself a factor of anarchy, of escape from the repeti- tiveness of physical fact.

Novel ideas function in this process as lures for intensification of experience; their truth-value is subordinate to their evoca- tive power. Although action in accordance with a true prop- osition is more likely to be successful, still, as an affective lure, “it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true”.6

The thread of experiences we traditionally identify with the mind exhibits a wide range of independence in its activity. Let us say, for example, that I am listening to a lecture which is marginally interesting. Much of what I experience will be deter- mined for me by my environment and by internal feeling of low

“Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New

”Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 51.

D. 516. 6Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933),

p. 313.

INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 319 intensity. Successive occasion of my experience will not depart widely from the ‘emotional categories of the environment’. I may doze, or allow my mind to wander. On the other hand, let us suppose that the talk electrifies my attention, challenges my beliefs. I wrestle with it. I experience a high degree of con- ceptual experience; i.e., successive entertainment of possibilities for my future experience which are novel, are in abstraction from my more conformal experiences. I adventure. Possibly I reach a conscious negative judgment, a peak of activity in the sense of an explicit feeling of absence which is an extreme form of the contrast between fact and possibility characterizing all my conscious experience.

No occasion of my experience is purely mental, however. My momentary unity of experience always has a double aspect; I find myself as a group of emotions, valuations already active, while my ‘I’ is my process of shaping this welter into a consis- tent pattern with my novel reactions.

Gradations in the intensity of human mental experience must be taken into account in the presentation of new ideas. For ideas do not come with any guarantee that they will be enter- tained at a high level of excitement, or fire up the student’s sense of adventure. Such an expectation reflects the notion that ideas can be handed over and stored while still retaining their original freshness. Whitehead recognises that this is not the case: “Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow or other it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.”’

The transmission-model has its worst effect here. The mind rejects knowledge imparted in a way which suggests that the march of novel ideas has ended, and now needs only to be handed on without modification. Whitehead calls this thought- sterilizing belief the fallacy of the perfect dictionary. Dry imposition of disciplined knowledge works against the nature of the experiential occasion, which starts as a ferment in which a reconciliation is sought between its inheritance and its possibilities of novel experience. Where any idea is presented in such a way that it does not allow fruitful contrast between these two poles, the occasion will resolve itself by a means in which novelty plays a negligible role; for example, dismissal, or ‘storage’. Organisms of low intensity of experience habitually

TWhitehead, The Aims of Education, p. 147.

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deal with environmental novelty in this way: “The low-grade organism is merely the summation of the forms of energy which flow in upon it in all their multiplicity of detail. It receives, and it transmits; but it fails to simplify into intelligible system.”’

The import of these remarks for the teaching situation is obvious. The notion of an occasion ignoring its potential diver- sity of components in favor of some pervasive uniformity in the style of its experience describes the behaviour of students in the face of either rote presentation of material or an over- whelming flood of novelty. David Ausubel, for example, describes the reaction of students presented mechanically with details of a new discipline as a retreat to the safety of the trans- mission-model: “As a result of this practice, students and teachers are coerced into treating meaningful materials as if they were rote in ~haracter .”~ This is what leads students to separate the questioning they experience in daily life from the activity in the classroom.

Many of us use a model of teaching which we experienced in graduate classes, one suitable for students in whom ‘the leap ing fire is already self-sustaining’, without evaluating its a p propriateness for beginners.

111. Mental Growth in the Philosophy Class If one accepts the process model of mental experience, his

approach to learning must recognize factors which increase the likelihood of a fruitful reconciliation of novel ideas with the student’s version of common sense. It seems to me that there are three ways in which such a success is impeded.

The first I have discussed above, the presentation of new material as if it were old, so that teaching is transformed into information transmission. The student settles into familiar types of performance, evaluating the usefulness of what he learns in terms of the examination. Such a retreat requires the teacher’s complicity. For example, we test for what we value. If that hap pens to be retention, it will appear not only in our tests but also in remarks to ‘get back to our topic’ when this inappro- priately refocuses the student’s attention on ‘covering the material’, at the expense of internalizing the course content.

A second error consists in exposing the student to too great a disparity between settled belief and novelty. Karl Hein describes

smitehead, Process and Reality, p. 389. 9David Ausubel, “A Cognitive-Structure Theory of School Learning”, in Instruc.

tion, edited by Laurence Siege1 (San Francisco: Chandler, 1967), p. 237.

INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 321 his lack of success with a philosophy of religion class which be- gan with Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. Apparently the shock value was not adjusted to the tolerance level of the class; ideas were dismissed and the same results obtained as in the rote method. Hein sympathizes with the demands put on the neophyte when he writes: “Yet when this student faces the philosophy teacher in those first few days he is asked to criticize, to analyze, to take nothing for granted, to become a Humean in a flash.””

The third pitfall is most often encountered in discussion classes, and might be described as untying all the knots in advance. Its worst version occurs when the teacher announces that every person’s opinion is of equal value. This effectively neutralizes the pain of abandoning any mental baggage. All risks are avoided.

On the positive side, the discussion method admits the affec- tive side of the student more than traditional arrangements. Theoretical support is provided by psychologists like Carl Rogers: “The teacher who can warmly accept, who can provide an unconditional positive regard, and who can empathize with the feeling of fear, anticipation, and discouragement which are involved in meeting new material, will have done a great deal toward setting the conditions for learning.””

How could such laudable aims become counterproductive? Rogers’ view has a partial truth. In the same essay, he des- cribes an ideal learning situation, an absence of requirements, grades, degrees, etc., on the assumption these are mere obstacles to the learning process. Apparently noninterference can accom- plish quite a bit. First, this is a denial of history. Whitehead correctly observes that “the child is the heir to long ages of civilisation, and it is absurd to let him wander in the intellec- tual maze”.” Secondly, it denies a more personal history. Primary and secondary schooling are not noted for their encour- agement of independence, and a tradition of passivity prolongs itself. Finally, it overlooks the ambiguity of the learner in the face of the new. We are creatures of attachments. There is an insightful passage in Process and Reality on this, which reads: “The world is thus faced with the paradox that, at least in its higher actualities, it craves for novelty and yet is haunted by terror at the loss of the past, with its familiarities and its loved

loKarl Hein, “Philosophy as an Activity and the Activity of Teaching”, Mefa-

11Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton-Mimin, 19611, p. 287f. IzWhitehead, The Aims of Education, p. 51.

philosophy 3 (1972), p. 179.

3 22 WILLIAM GALLAGHER

ones. . . . Part of the joy of the new years is the hope of the old round of seasons, with their stable facts.””

In psychoanalytic personality theory, we find statements that the mind’s basic function is sustaining a homeostatic equilibrium within the organism which is constantly disturbed by life’s very process. At the other extreme, Maslow writes about mental growth: “We see clearly an eagerness to grow up, to drop the old adjustment as outworn, like an old pair of shoes”.” Some- where between the two lies the more complex truth about human mental growth which we must accept in teaching. Mental growth is rhythmical precisely because it has a foot in both worlds. There is attachment to one’s narrow and safe world of doxa, with its egocentrism, and there is also the desire for a more disinterested, allocentric experience. Successful teaching helps the student moderate the two. Fortunately, we have an ally in the instinct for novelty. Whitehead’s passage on terror at the loss of a familiar round of experience continues: “Yet con- jointly with this terror, the present as mere unrelieved preserva- tion of the past assumes the character of a horror of the past, rejection of it, rev~l t .”‘~

The student will not necessarily learn philosophy if it is simply handed out, nor will he necessarily step eagerly into the role of fellow-searcher. It is sometimes a surprise when the re- moval of alleged barriers to learning does not have the desired effect. Torbert and Hackman found that the weight of tradi- tional learning methods was insurmountable for many students in an innovative psychology course. One student wrote: “It is hard to suddenly drop the guidelines set for us by these (con- ventional) techniques and strike out on our own.”16 Cynicism, rather than a sense of adventure, was the attitude of many, who translated the innovations as an opportunity to get some- thing for nothing. Others experienced more conflict : “When- ever I thought of working for the internal rewards in this course, there was always something to do for an external reward that seemed more immediate.”

The process model requires that we enter the experimental complex of the student first, and then help him to move out of

13Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 516. laAbraham Maslow, “Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation”, in

Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1955), p. 6. 15 Whitehead, Process and Real&, p. 516. 16William Torbert and Richard Hackman, “Taking the Fun Out of Outfoxing the

System”, in Changing College Classroom, edited by Philip Runkel (San Franciso: Jossey-Bass, 19691, p. 174.

INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 323 it over the course of the term. Independent, self-initiated learn- ing is an admirable goal for the introductory course, but assum- ing it at the beginning is short-sighted. Why should the student abandon the other game, whose rules he knows well enough to have achieved some success at it?

IV. Practical Application of the Model I would like to describe a method of teaching the introductory

course with groups of thirty or so students, which has taken these considerations into account.

In order to minimize the effect of too early a challenge to student expectations, I begin the course in a standard manner, with test dates, required readings and so on. I assume, without comment, an authoritarian classroom structure. My first goal is to let the students know what philosophy is and how to go about doing it. Previous experience with trying to describe or define philosophy has taught me to avoid anything so ambitious so soon. I assume that most students have not come across any- thing in print before which looks like philosophy, and so lack a mental file drawer for it. Since they have a mental set for litera- ture, I start with the Gorgias, for its dramatic value and its value for introducing ethics.

I make no demand at first that the students personalize what they read, but during the same part of the course, I ask them to take the Gordon Survey of Personal and Interpersonal Val~es . '~ This is quite effective for raising individual value systems up to conceptual explicitness. By the time we have gotten into the Calliclean position, students begin to 'get off the topic', choosing sides, making connections with personal experience, and beginning to seek a theoretical basis to vindi- cate their idiosyncratic positions. The combat runs its course and leads to a desire for conceptual clarity as to possible sources for norms. At this point I can move to a more formal procedure of presenting various definitions of ethical behaviour, clarifying the bases of Socrates' and Callicles' positions, etc. Students become aware that personal experience can be brought to bear on such issues, and also that mere sharing of experience is in- adequate for satisfying their growing desire for system. Thus a combination of the familiar and the new obtains. In this movement, I am guided by Whitehead's view that

1'Leonard Gordon, Survey of Personal Values, Survey of Inter-personal Values (Chicago : Science Research Associates, 1960).

324 WILLIAM GALLAGHER

education is most successful when it moves between expansive curiosity and disciplined thought, because this matches a natural rhythm in cognitive development. He writes that unless the prior stage of ‘romance’ runs its course, the advance to theory will be seen as an imposition from without, rather than as answering the student’s own needs. Ideally, “the facts of romance have disclosed ideas with possibilities of wide signifi- cance, and in the stage of precise progress we acquire other facts in a systematic order, which thereby form both a dis- closure and an analysis of the general subject-matter of the romance”.

In the approach I have described, a congenial compromise of authoritarian safety and a degree of independence exists. This stability lasts only for a short time, for these are conflicting needs, and the increase in the latter inevitably clashes with the former. About the time of the first test, there are expres- sions of discontent with the testing, with my position as authority, and so on, a general feeling that the direction of the course, and the direction of the student’s thinking are not in harmony with the structures I have laid out in advance.

The first time I witnessed this phenomenon, I wrongly assumed that it interferred with the learning process. Now I realize that its occurence is a sign that genuine learning is taking place, for the students are begining to face many of the issues they have encountered in the figure of Socrates, resisting com- mon sense and the authority of tradition in search of a per- sonally fulfilling way of life.

The allowance of such discord demands a high tolerance for risk and unpredictability in the teacher, for the retreat to the safety of rote learning is tempting at this stage. The affective stakes mount as the course begins to reorganize.

Several times the section on political philosophy has become a focal point for the students’ growth. When I introduce Rous- seau’s idea that the only legitimate political organization is one contracted freely by its members, it resonates with themes which have not yet emerged into explicitness in the students’ minds. In one section, it was at this point that the structure of the course was explicitly challenged by a majority. I saw this as an appropriate point to present the contrasting view of Hobbes for strong centralized authority, but I had hardly done so when vigorous debate ensued as to the validity of his pessimistic

lawhitehead, The Aims of Education, p. 30.

INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 325

assumptions about human nature. The class became exhilarating only after I realized that my course goals were being achieved before my eyes. I did manage to draw together the themes of the debate, after it had run its course. In subsequest classes, we did reach general principles about the rule of law, the rela- tion between individual freedom and societal responsibilities, etc. But simultaneously I was a participant in an unbloody revolution, highly involving, demanding articulate spokesmen willing to research their positions. The course was reorganized away from my Hobbesian model toward a more democratic one.

Did this involve duplicity on my part, in the sense of my hidden agenda for the course? I prefer to think that I was reaching some valuable learnings by a circuitous route made necessary by the rhythmical nature of mental growth. I am in agreement with Patricia Glassheim on this point: “To be sig- nificant, philosophical issues need to come out of the experience of the student. To me this does not preclude the possibility of manipulating experience in order to allow such issues to emerge.”l’

When the progress of the course is viewed as a process of creative advance, with cycles in which the need for adventure and the need for stability alternate, then the teacher becomes more sensitive to whether, in a particular phase, it is more appropriate to provide answers or questions. Sheer continuous dialogue seems to be high in intellectual ferment but low in ideational anchorage points for handling difficult material, while a steady flow of information risks the loss of personal involvement.

Whitehead describes a third stage beyond those of romance and precision, in which intellectual exactness reaps its reward in the form of an integrated theoretical basis for future experi- ence of greater depth. It is a return to romance, yet with the advantage of newly forged mental tools. Such a level of experi- ence, if it can be induced in a philosophy course to any extent, is of great benefit to the whole human personality. It increases the student’s openness to novel experience and enriches his sense of autonomy. Whitehead writes : “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There has been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of

loPatricia Glassheim, “New Approaches to Teaching and Learning Philosophy”, Metaphilosophy 4 (1973), p. 182.

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emotion by understanding.”20 Surely such an increase in our students’ capability for adventure, for abandonment of the il- lusory security of convention, is worth our efforts. LOS ANGELES HARBOR COLLEGE

ZOAlfrcd North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 232.