By Michael Mendoza
As a part of their program of study in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy MEd Interdisciplinary Education, Curriculum Studies Program–students participate in a summer seminar with UHM philosophy professor, Thomas Jackson. The course is titled, PHIL 725: Philosophical Topics- Philosophy, Childhood, and Education. It examines issues, theories, perspectives and problems that philosophers, from a variety of cultural backgrounds and historical contexts, have tackled over the past 2500 years. The goal of the course is to provide educators with a philosophical “grounding” that promotes awareness, encourages knowledgeable reflection, and develops skills necessary for becoming a teacher-philosopher. Following is a reflection shared by UHM Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy graduate student, Michael Mendoza.
What do we mean by purity in our thinking and wondering? And as educators, should we be seeking it? These questions were at the front of my mind as Dr. Jackson’s PHIL 725 course for the summer came to a close. As part of the inaugural Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy MEd-CS cohort, I had spent the last three weeks in this course thinking collaboratively about philosophy and the wonder that drives it. On numerous occasions over those three weeks, the discussion had naturally drifted into questions of how to best cultivate and reawaken wonder in students and what conditions are necessary and sufficient for wonder to take hold. Inevitably, this question gave way to questions about the purest forms of wonder, perhaps those which predate our use of language, or those which escape the confines of culture. Language and culture, it was admitted, are in some ways liberating, providing us frameworks through which our ideas may be reinterpreted and tools with which our thinking may be reconstructed. Nonetheless, the elusive pure forms of wonder, philosophy, and learning free of linguistic and cultural restraint still hung over us, as unreachable as they were tantalizing, implicit even when they were not named.
As the summer progressed, I was growing increasingly uncertain that we knew what we meant when we spoke of or motioned towards these pure forms, and I was even more uncertain that anything fitting these descriptions would be truly desirable. What did it mean for wonder to be pure, and why did we think we wanted it? My mind was drawn to thoughts of the most potent forms of wonder I had experienced, and none of them seemed particularly pure to me. A community of inquiry, where so much wonder can be expressed and shared, is premised on a heterogeneous mixture of ideas, a composting of thought in Donna Haraway’s (Staying With the Trouble, 2013) sense. The unconstrained creativity of the greatest scientists and artists is born not out of keeping yourself pure but out of mixing oneself deeply with the world around you. Even those moments of quiet, wordless awe that saturate our childhoods were not moments of isolated mindfulness, of stepping back from the world in perfect observation of it, but rather of full commitment to one’s embodiment and emplacement in that world; it is in mixing things together, adulterating them, making them impure that we find wonder most present in our minds.
The following reflection is the result of these thoughts and others that I found myself with at the end of this course. I draw on two quotations from works that have greatly impacted my understanding of philosophy and our way of living in the world where we find ourselves, the Zhuangzi (2013, transl. Burton Watson) and John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). Although they originate from very different authors with very different backgrounds and take very different routes to dealing with the very different topics they tackle, these works seem to me to speak to many of the same concepts and ways of seeing and thinking; both maintain a suspicion of purity and an appreciation for the beauty of uncertainty and incompleteness. I build on these quotations in order to speak to these concepts and their bearing on the notion of purity, although I do so not in the spirit of articulating a perfect (or even imperfect) truth, but rather in the spirit of “seeing what happens” in the words of Richard Rorty (Philosophy and Social Hope, 1999). I invite you to see what happens along with me.
In Defense of Impurity
Ziqi said, “The Great Clod belches out breath, and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them, long drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts. They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan, and howl, those in the lead calling out yeee!, those behind calling out yuuu! In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again. Have you never seen the tossing and trembling that goes on?”
Ziyou said, “By the piping of earth, then, you mean simply [the sound of] these hollows, and by the piping of man, [the sound of] flutes and whistles. But may I ask about the piping of Heaven?” Ziqi said, “Blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each can be itself—all take what they want for themselves, but who does the sounding?”
[Zhuangzi Chapter 2:4-5]
It seems to me that to seek purity is to seek a sound without a vessel in which it resonates.
Like Plato, we observe the way that each hollow in the wood takes up the wind in its own way, and from this deduce that there must be some untainted sound underlying them, some pure essence which each adulterates in the same moment that they realize it.
But what is sound without a resonant space? What is sound without someone to imperfectly hear it? And why do we believe it would be beautiful?
We might also ask: What is a resonant space without wind to excite it? What is hearing without a sound to hear? And to which of these roles can the creation of the sound be credited (or perhaps blamed)?
Who does the sounding?
We speak of the content of learning as emerging from the encounter between what students know and what they experience, between a framework and something that does not yet fit into it.
Does anything remain pure in this encounter?
And why do we believe such a pure thing would be beautiful?
There are two sorts of possible worlds in which esthetic experience would not occur. In a world of mere flux, change would not be cumulative; it would not move toward a close. Stability and rest would have no being. Equally is it true, however, that a world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envisage with pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict. Because the actual world, that in which we live, is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and re-unions, the experience of a living creature is capable of esthetic quality. The live being recurrently loses and reestablishes equilibrium with his surroundings. The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life. In a finished world, sleep and waking could not be distinguished. In one wholly perturbed, conditions could not even be struggled with. In a world made after the pattern of ours, moments of fulfillment punctuate experience with rhythmically enjoyed intervals.
[John Dewey, Art as Experience pg. 16-17]
We do not live in a finished world.
We are not God, seeing everything in its totality at once, unfolded in front of us through perfect rationality. We see something because we do not see everything; we are in the world because we are not above it.
We do not live in a world wholly perturbed.
We are not nothing, carried helplessly along the currents of reality. We are here because we are not nowhere; we are immersed in the world because we are not identical to it.
Why, then, do we fantasize about Godhood and nothingness?
When we seek purity (in our wonderings, our thoughts, our actions, our identities, ourselves), what is it that we think we will find? What do we believe we infinitely approach, even if we may never reach it?
Our godhood is defiled by our embodiment, by our having this point of view rather than another. Our nothingness is spoiled by our emplacement, by our being in this place, in this culture, in this web of relationships rather than another.
We are something, we are somewhere. Rather, we are this, we are here. Most of all, we are together.
Works Cited:
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York, Penguin Books, 2005.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. London, Duke University Press, 2016.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York, Penguin Books, 1999.
Zhuangzi. The Complete Works of Zhuangzi. Translated by Burton Watson, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Mendoza graduated from Stanford in the spring of 2021 with a bachelor’s in philosophy, and had previously spent the summer of 2019 interning at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education learning about philosophy for children and progressive education. His academic interests are in phenomenology and philosophy of mind as well as education, with a particular interest in the aesthetic dimensions of educational experience. He is drawn to and motivated by thinking about and creating new ways of experiencing and engaging with our worlds of meaning, be it through writing, discussion, play, creativity, or any other means.
