Steps towards a Spinozian curriculum

 

1.1 Prologue

 

This paper shall involve three movements in educational thought. The first we may bracket within experience. That is, my teaching of the International Baccalaureate TOK (theory of knowledge) course. The second area that I shall address may be broadly defined by the title, ‘Hegel and Education’. This part of the piece acts as a counter-poise to the third and underpins the first. However, this underpinning is not necessary, or at least should not serve as a regulatory or controlling with respect to TOK teaching. What I seek to demonstrate is that the connection between Hegel and education is still prevalent and affects the teaching of the International Baccalaureate (IB), even without an a priori, thoroughgoing knowledge of his philosophy. The last element of this work concerns Spinoza. I have chosen Spinoza as his ideas could be taken as a counter movement against Hegelianism, and may be used in this context as an attempt to position the philosophical imagination at the centre of the pre-university, international curriculum and the theory of knowledge.

When teaching theory of knowledge to International Baccalaureate students, one is struck by the fundamental change in emphasis between six academic, time consuming and curriculum laden (in terms of content) subjects, and the questioning nature of the theory of knowledge course. The students come into the TOK classroom expecting to be given more knowledge to learn and to reproduce this knowledge under examination conditions. They are, on the whole, accelerated, and receptive to a certain type of teacher/pupil relationship that is dominated by a passive/active dynamic between the pupil and the teacher. It could be said that ‘breakthrough’ TOK learning happens when the normative rules governing educational behaviour are broken, and constructive questioning of the assumptions that underlie the activity of learning has begun. In other words, the pupils are being continually ‘redirected’ and asked to reconstruct their primary manner of intellectual inquiry with an opposite focus in the TOK classroom. This leads to the conclusion that there is a ‘resonant oscillation’ at the heart of the IB curriculum, which one might use to figure a definition of the academic becoming that the IB instigates. The pupils move forwards in terms of more efficient digestion and reproduction of learnt knowledge and learnt thinking skills from the six academic areas, and go backwards in terms of formulating questions and structured answers that challenge the assumptions that were set in the academic areas.

 

1.2 The empty ‘knower’

It is to this extent that the International Baccalaureate instigates bildung. According to Hegel, education happens through experience; this is a conflict-ridden process in the course of which a spiritual being discovers its own identity or selfhood, while striving to actualise the selfhood it is in the process of discovering. When referring to the IB, TOK diagram, the child studying for his or her qualification is an empty ‘knower’. They are necessarily rational, self-directed, and not merely constructed in a process of conditioning through environmental stimuli or the accumulation of information presented by experience. The emptiness of the knower allows for the spiritual dimension of Hegelianism to take hold in a fundamental sense. The knower is devoid of substance, and full of spirit, that may tend towards that which is not familiar, and grasp the universality of concepts.[1] Education was defined by Hegel as being the “laborious emergence from the immediacy of substantial life,”[2] the IB succeeds in this enterprise to the extent that the knower is replete with knowledge processing resources, and is able to explain them in universal terms.

What alternatives are there to this model of knowledge, and why might we wish to depart from the course of Hegelian education? The first and most basic objection to Hegelianism comes at the level of the empty knower, who is to be filled with curriculum details and consequently asked to question this ‘filling’. Such an educational schema is fundamentally contradictory and idealistic. I find myself as a pre-university teacher having to impart knowledge in terms of ‘snapshots’ of philosophy and logic, which serve in the minds of the students as extra knowledge content, and some even try to learn this curriculum in preparation for exams. Other students do have the requisite reflexivity to question the knowledge processes that are being initiated through the IB; my search is to find a model of knowledge that offers help to the students without the natural capacity to question the authority of the academic disciplines in which they are enmeshed. To enable this model I have turned to Spinoza, who may be employed in order to challenge the status of the empty knower, and who has prioritised the imagination as fundamental to intellectual processes.

 

2.1 The immanence of desire

Hegel clearly tried to outplay Spinoza with the dialectics that transcend material substance and take the novice on the road to Absolute Spirit. I tend to agree with Macherey and Holland, in that Spinozian substance is not subsumed by Hegelian negation, but that his philosophy is a path not taken in the course of western thought.[3] I intend to use Spinoza for our teaching purposes, and in the process to challenge Hegelian assumptions of learning as they emerge. Firstly, one must not oppose thought and matter, because, according to Spinoza, they are part of the same substance that does not define a subject, but offers an immanent field that provides no negativity, and for which no contradiction is possible or necessary.[4] Consequently, the development of adequate ideas depends upon the imagination being able to distance the intellectual processes of the students from the distortion of subject-centred thinking. In other words, the basis of Spinozian education is to stimulate and extol the imagination, or, as Gilles Deleuze has expressed it: “The faculty of imagination is defined by the conditions in which we naturally have ideas, inadequate ideas; it is nonetheless in one of its aspects a virtue; it involves our power of thinking even though it is not explained by it – an image involves its own cause, even though it does not express it.”[5]

At this point, we should stop and reflect upon several of the consequences of such a starting point for a Spinozian curriculum. It could be said that the pupils in the classroom are no longer empty ‘knowers’ set to be filled with knowledge and set on the path to irrefutable truth; but instead they define a plane of immanence. This is because in the Spinozian curriculum we are challenging the assumption of ‘self-hood’ and instead appreciating that the students are full of desire; this desire may be repressed or chaotic or subdued, in any event, it is qualitatively present in the learning environment. The job of the teacher is to take heed of the plane of immanence that the students represent, and to provide the conditions whereby the students may produce ideas in relation to this plane. Perhaps these ideas will be inadequate ideas; in whatever form the ideas of the students emerge from the plane of immanence produced by their desire, they will at least be images that express affective processes that are present in the classroom. In a sense, the classroom is a chance encounter between bodies, and as the Deleuzian critic, Michael Hardt has written, these random moments present, “corporeal relationships that are representable through the work of the imagination, and that are open to the laws of composability. They may be true and adequate.”[6]

 

2.2 The politics of affection

 In terms of educational philosophy, a broad political frame is already forming around this paper. The Spinozian curriculum that is at issue is following in the post structural vein of educationalists such as Megan Boler or Mary Leach, who have taken the ideas of Moira Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd and Gilles Deleuze, and used them in order to analyse emotions in education in terms of “inscribed habits of inattention.”[7] In contrast to the disciplined other of verbally correct, non-distracted learning behaviour, Boler posits her analysis as being within the area of educational ‘fall-out’. In other words, we, as educators of the Spinozian curriculum are in the business of examining in detail the desires and the emotions of the pupils as they actually occur in the classroom, and not as we think that they should occur according to pre-set curriculum or behavioural concerns. This ‘scheme of work’ is clearly problematic for the ambitious, goal driven teacher, or those concerned with following the exact prescriptions as laid out in the IB handbooks. Yet an important aspect of the Spinozian curriculum is the examination and consequent reflection on this ‘problem’. Put another way, we cannot turn away from the educational truth of the affective environment in which our knowledge dissemination is based. Indeed, it could be argued that the vestiges of Hegelianism in the international curriculum are there in order to take the educator away from the direct emotional and desirous environment and into a self-conscious idealism that values knowledge in its own terms and in so doing dispenses with the visceral. I am proposing that to centralise the imagination in the temporal and emotionally dependent affective classroom, offers the educator significant and heterogeneous opportunities for teaching and learning. But before we continue to immerse ourselves in this Spinozian alternative, we must systematically proceed with the exploration of Hegelianism in order to enable further differentiation between the two models of education.

One of the principle objections to the Spinozian curriculum from a Hegelian perspective is that it does not allow the opportunity to gather the truth. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness is shaped by two fundamental moments: 1) ‘the being of something for consciousness or knowing’, and, 2) ‘the being in itself of this same thing which is called truth’.[8] To attain genuine knowledge, a shape of consciousness must ascertain that its moment of knowledge agrees with its own moment of truth. It need not appeal to any criteria outside of itself, it has found the truth; but if its own proper conceptions are in disharmony with one another, then spirit is impelled to go beyond it and to seek the truth in a different shape.[9] This is the Hegelian schema for the perception of genuine knowledge; at its heart is the notion that negation is a necessary principle that determines knowing. In Hegel’s terms, the disharmony of the conceptions of knowledge and the truth leads to a breakdown of each shape of consciousness and the form of a determinate negation; this in turn results in a specific new shape which appears in its way as being higher or deeper, one step closer to the truth than the shape that has gone before.[10] This process of bildung is depicted in the Phenomenology as being an ideal course of philosophical method leading to a genuine science; but through allusions of varying specificity and explicitness, it can also be seen to be the course that human spirit has taken through history.

The extension of bildung in the Phenomenology exemplifies through contrast some of the important features that the Spinozian curriculum exhibits. The student of the Spinozian curriculum is not required to negate previous shapes of consciousness, in order to demonstrate one closer to the truth; instead they are asked to participate in the immanence of the plane of becoming as defined by the group. In the case of the TOK class, the student will be required to develop a philosophical imagination. It could be stated that in this context there is no one ideal course of inquiry leading to a ‘nexus’ of TOK knowledge (such as notions of higher rationality); in the Spinozian curriculum there are the heterogeneous material effects of desire, that signify a plane of change, and a dynamic feeder mechanism to stimulate, in this instance, the philosophical imagination. One might reasonably interject at this point that the Spinozian curriculum will suffer from a lack of direction, and at least the force of idealism gives the educator a definite focus through which he or she may lead the class, and not wait for the vagaries of the philosophical imagination to develop in the flux of desire in the TOK classroom. Yet this is precisely the difference in teaching practise that the use of the Spinozian curriculum is striving to open up. Philosophical inquiry is heterogeneous, in that control of its logic from a fixed non-material direction, may lead to the sense that it is an imposed and therefore disconnected subject (in terms of students emphasis). Perhaps a better question to ask at this point in our ‘Steps towards a Spinozian curriculum’ is: Do we merely overlay one idealism with another through the suggestion that heterogeneity should replace a singular path to the truth?

 

3.1 Conjecture, superstition and gossip

It is clear that this offers a more stinging criticism of the Spinozian curriculum. Another way of expressing this argument is, that by allowing many paths to the truth (through the heterogeneity of desire) are we denying any access to any truth, we are, in fact, confusing the issues under scrutiny through the overlay of idealisms. The example of scientific education, where clear and distinct knowledge is sought to construct ideas beyond the spurious and random, shows how the Spinozian curriculum may be doubted in terms of its ‘inscribed habits of inattention’, and the immanence of desire. We may wonder how rigorous definitions of the natural world may be achieved when we are proposing the use the mode of imagination as fundamental to learning and perhaps the combined structuring educational methodology of conjecture, superstition and gossip in the affective classroom. However, Spinoza did make a distinction between the mode of apprehension of the imagination, rationality that requires a distance from subjectivity and the mode of intuition that makes possible a complete rational grasp of the real. It should be noted that in Spinoza’s Ethics, rationality is firmly based in the imagination as a complementary attribute. Or, as Deleuze has expressed it: “Reason profits from one of the features of imagination, the more we understand things as necessary, the less we feel the strength or intensity of passions rooted in the imagination.”[11] In other words, we do not lose the sensible and the rational by basing our curriculum in the imaginative and the affective, but in fact we are developing a relationship between the two. This relationship may be lost or written over in a homogenised and closed environment, which would set Hegelian idealism in the form of the negation to discern the truth, and negate the maelstrom of emotionality in its wake. The vital distinction that is at stake in the Spinozian curriculum is that there is no one pre-determined educational model, which ‘directs’ the teaching and learning of the classes. In its place we as educators are continually working on the conditions for the production of ideas, and the relationships that define this production in the affective environment.

This ‘working’ defines a holistic element in education that has been picked up in the international curriculum. I suspect this ‘pick up’ has been due, in part, to the imperative in international education to think beyond the local, and to extend towards the whole in terms of mediation of intellectual pursuit through organizations such as the United Nations. However, even though the Spinozian curriculum is a rational one that is based on the production of ideas through the affective imagination, there is no guarantee that these ideas will be limit-thoughts. Indeed, the Spinozian curriculum may well remain in the conjectural, superstitious and gossip-laden. Yet, given the affirmative and heterogeneous arena produced through the Spinozian curriculum, I believe that it should give the students ample opportunity to go beyond the limiting factors of short term learnt knowledge, and for them to make substantial connections between different areas of thought. In the case of TOK, the fundamental teaching of the philosophical imagination as an affective process should galvanise the teaching of an otherwise possibly disparate and at times bewildering subject.

We have again taken a perhaps more instinctual educational path due to the Spinozian curriculum. In contrast, we find that in the Phenomenology, the ‘natural self’ is cancelled (aufheben) by a process through which modern culture forms the modern self, whose main aim is the actualisation of its own freedom. This is a process through which a human being becomes not merely a self, but a particular kind of self, deriving a sense of self-worth from a chosen way of life and from living according to self-given rules or principles.[12] Or to use the language that Hegel employed in the Philosophy of Right, early modern culture (bildung), was to shape the ‘moral subject’ that finds its self-actualisation in ‘subjective freedom’.[13] One could at this point look at a certain cultural and historical moment, and in so doing compare the actualised, modern Hegelian position with the wayward romantic of the early 19^th century. Does the Spinozian curriculum by rejecting the Hegelian scheme, keep us in the wholly natural and unruly, and therefore allow no escape to subjective freedom? This again is perhaps not the correct question to ask, as there is no clear-cut or necessary distinction between the ordered, moral, conventional modern and the chaotic, immoral, unconventional romantic, as defining the difference between Hegelian education and the Spinozian curriculum respectively. A better next step to take towards the Spinozian curriculum is through the question: What is the cultural formation that we seek to promote through our lessons?

 

3.2 Civil society and the force of the group

It could be said that the Spinozian curriculum promotes a wholly positive educational format. This is not to say that students may not have a negative attitude, or produce weak or confusing ideas. The point is that the force of negativity is to be realigned from a position of contradiction (Hegelianism), to one of productivity. One might notice that even the most nihilistic ideas may be appreciated from the perspective of being constitutive of the affective imagination. The elimination of contradiction from the basis of learning opens up the type of culture and society that the Spinozian curriculum induces. Unlike the precepts of education we find, for example, in Hobbs; the students and educators are not obliged to hand over their natural rights to a sovereign power in order to safe-guard their private interests and found a political society. Conversely, one may point out that interpersonal relations were already political to begin with, and the political force of the particular educational units that are present in the Spinozian curriculum depend upon how extensively, intensively and harmoniously these passionate relations are composed. This composition represents a rejection of the social contract (à la Rousseau) and denies any need for transcendent authority (potestas) and alternatively grounds politics immanently (non-dialectically) in the force of the group (potentia multitudine).[14] It should also be added that there is no educational justification or motive according to the Spinozian curriculum for submitting to the external control of the State in the classroom. In so far as relations are grounded in passion, there is no necessity that these passions are sublimated in contractual agreements such as the notion of citizenship or in the portrayal of individuals with rights.

Such an obligatory factor was one of the intentions of Hegelian education. Through the use of the principle of negation and the diminution of the imagination, Hegel and his followers organised a system that sought a rational progression from the family through civil society to the State. Essential to this conception of progress is the idea of civil society. It is the link between the personal and the public, consisting of two conceptions of the self, (the subject) and (the person). Civil society is based in the modern market economy, or what Hegel called the ‘system of needs’.[15] This system is responsible for developing a legal hierarchy of rights around the private individual, and the network of civil institutions including education, that protect the economic realm and develop it into a genuine social home in which individual freedom may flourish.[16] It is in this respect that the IB system of education closely relates to the principles of Hegelianism. The idea that the institutions of education are protectors of economics and that education leads to greater subjective freedom is played out on a daily basis in terms of discussing the IB diploma with the students. The TOK root of the IB places questioning of the status and nature of knowledge at the centre of the programme. In synthesis, this placement may be summarised by the indicative phrase, “you are what you know”, which suggests the development of the relationship between the private individual and a public figure with rights. It is also at the heart of the universal conception of civil society, or the idea that a global economy is run by professionals defined by their knowledge skills.

Hegel considered that the modern market economy promoted a deepened interdependence between people and ways of life that, even prior to reflection, are systematically orientated towards the common good. He thought that those who reject modernity in favour of natural simplicity are akin to the ancient Cynics, whose life was actually ‘un-free’ because their rejection of civilization was “merely a consequence of these same social conditions, and in itself an unprepossessing product of luxury.”[17] In addition, when modern civil society expands people’s needs, this is a sign that individuals are being encouraged to value their own opinion, even their own arbitrariness; and this is the social medium through which they also augment the inner life of moral subjectivity, and the subjective freedom which is the proper contribution of the modern world to the development of spirit.[18] In application of these Hegelian ideas, one might state that the expansion of needs in terms of education leads to the greater valuing and interdependence of knowledge skills and the subsequent articulation of that knowledge. Also, this use of language is necessary in terms of the pursuit of technical employment to satisfy the expansion of desire that the market economy provokes and enables.

 

4.1 Post-modern education

Its could be argued at this point in our ‘steps towards a Spinozian education’, that the Hegelian alternative is practical and apposite in that civil society is the dominant cultural form that IB students will progress into and be part of. Also, this society conforms to the general tenets of modern democracy, which should be a central concern of the IB teacher. However, as Jean-François Lyotard has argued in the Post-modern Condition, the new arrangements of data in post-modern society must be connected in order to articulate the knowledge problems that confront us. This capacity to express that which was formerly separate is called the imagination. It is possible to conceive of the world of post-modern knowledge as governed by a game of perfect information in the sense that the data is in principle accessible to any expert: i.e., there is no scientific secret. Given equal competence, what extra perfomativity depends upon in the final analysis is ‘imagination’ which allows one either to make a new move or to change the rules of the game.[19] In other words, we are saying that the emphasis on the articulation of technical knowledge in civil society has been played out through the movement of modernism, and this system has now been exhausted in a post-modern, electronically connected environment (even though the institutions and machinery of modernism clearly still survive). This environment is the one in which the pupils increasingly find themselves. If you know where to look, technical knowledge is freely available, yet making sense of it, using it, applying it to other fields of enquiry (for example, the connection between sociology and geography come together in the post-modern field of ‘urbanism’) all require imaginative thought.

It is precisely these imaginative thinking processes that the Spinozian curriculum centralises in teaching and learning. I perceive the Spinozian curriculum to be a sort of ‘feeder mechanism’ to establish and determine the new areas of intellectual inquiry that are emerging in contemporary society. It is not that the Spinozian curriculum denies the educative purpose of making students ‘fit into’ civil society, but that it gives the educator the imaginative resource at its base in order to link knowledge areas and in so doing open up new intellectual terrain for exploration. It may well be that the Hegelian diagnostic of the market economy being responsible for a system of needs and knowledge necessities of the pupils is sound. Yet the educational tendency resulting from this Hegelian logic is to consequently make the ‘knowledge market’ an overwhelming and dominant consideration, which clouds all other possibilities and might obscure less obvious ‘truths’ about education. For example, it may well be that the educational separation from funding matters that has been set into place by the bureaucracies of liberal democracy and by the power of the State, begins to unwind as the post-modern reality of immensely powerful corporations and the importance of international commerce changes our notion of the free market and takes us into the unprecedented period of globalisation that sets new challenges distinct from civil society.

Hegelians would perhaps counter at this point in the ‘steps toward a Spinozian curriculum’ that we are misunderstanding spirit, reason and the ethical nature of education. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argued that education (bildung) in its absolute determination is liberation and work towards a higher liberation; it is the absolute transition to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life, which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of a universality.[20] The cultivation of universality if thought in Hegel’s terms is the absolute value of education; in other words it is the purification of the crude and barbaric manner of the natural drives of ‘Mankind’. It could be said that the rational processes of representation, estimation and comparison bestow an external perspective on the internality of desire. This perspective according to Hegelianism contributes towards happiness, and the infinite aim of understanding desire through the educative passage to the universal.

 

4.2 Conatus

It is at this moment that we arrive at the crux of Hegelian education and the crucial conjunction between Hegelianism and the IB programme of education. This is that at the heart of both schemes is the notion of reason as the arbitrator and controlling force in the development of the pupils. The position of the empty knower as the subject of IB education precludes and externalises the force of reason as the ‘prime mover’ in a developmental ideology designed to provide international citizens that reflect the power of globalisation. It is in this sense that reason is a disciplinary and ordering power that lends itself to the containment of desire through the knowledge ‘stack-system’ of the IB and the regulation of the imagination through universality (internationalism). Spinoza has shown us a way out of this logic by reinstating the imagination as the focal, internally based process that provides the key to intellectual development. This reinstatement of the interactions of the imagination with the central emotions of desire, i.e. joy and sadness, yield systematic variations in the intensity of attachment and aversion present in the immanence of desire.[21] These fluctuations are different from the ordered relations between clear and distinct ideas of reason; but they nonetheless have an order of their own which lends itself to rational investigation. The Spinozian curriculum will therefore make the investigation of the affective as its ‘knowledge core’, augmenting the imagination of the group and following the practical and ethical orientation that is derived in part from the Hellenistic tradition of philosophical education, the ideal of radical criticism of convention.[22]

This central concern of the Spinozian curriculum in the emotional and the imaginative also direct us to one of Spinoza’s main ideas, that of conatus. This is the endeavour or struggle to persist in being, which also informs Spinoza’s treatment of individuality. This type of individuality is sharply contrasted with the Hegelian individual made out of ‘bildung’, as it directs the educator inwards towards unconscious affects where learning actually takes place (and is not forced externally through reason into the universal). The Spinozian curriculum will therefore importantly examine the way in which the conditioning and habitual practises of communities and institutes of society, have placed knowledge into determined places. Or, as Michael Hardt has noted: “The investigation of power constitutes the end of speculation and the beginning of practise, it is the moment in which we stop striving to think the world and begin to create it.”[23] The Spinozian curriculum should take us in this direction as it has the power of conatus as its root and the teaching of the imaginary in an affirmative classroom atmosphere. The explanation of the workings of contemporary power is a complex problem that will tax any educator or cohort under his or her charge. Yet, the treatment of this problem, without necessary resolution, may provide a vital and combinatory factor that ‘makes sense’ of the plethora of intellectual knowledge fields that lay before the student.

Contemporary theorists of international education such as Daniel Goleman or Patrick Sherlock have dealt with similar themes from a distinct angle in terms of presenting some of the ways in which global educators should integrate the training of affective capacities in an academic environment (emotional intelligence). However, the message of such work parallels the Hegelian model of education as the emotions are fundamentally ‘curtailed’ by reason in that the self is taught to accept international frontier crossing values of peace and tolerance.[24] Whilst the Spinozian curriculum does exclude such ideas, it is also not a necessary aspect of its teaching. One might also say that the Hegelian educational progression through bildung into civil society and the end of universal rationality, does not solely figure in the imaginative examination of the affective educational environment. As such, the Spinozian curriculum takes away the pressure that education entails an end in itself. Whilst Hegelians promote the end of a wholly ordered rational society, Spinozians posit it as one of many possible outcomes. The Spinozian curriculum will ‘limit’ itself to the exploration of desire, yet this limitation is also the opening up of possibility according to the workings of the imaginary. It could be that this type of education may encourage radical revolt, ironic detachment or self-protective flight from the real problems that face society today. However, there are already negative attitudes present in contemporary society, and whilst the Spinozian curriculum does not necessarily induce and encourage their proliferation, it also does not attempt to negate their importance through the external power of reason or the mediation of education in civil society. Our curriculum focuses upon the real motive forces of conatus and exhibits them through the imaginary.

 

5.1 An educational plateau

In conclusion, it may be stated that the Spinozian curriculum is about joy as it “proposes a singular conception of being animated by an absolutely positive and internal difference.”[25] The process of imagining is fundamental to this conception as the model of development contained is embedded in frameworks of desire and power that can in turn be subjected to critique.[26] Therefore negativity doesn’t figure in this educational model. Even though the ‘hardy’ educator may well encounter diametrically opposed students, displaying disruptive, rebellious, disinterested or alienated behaviour, the Spinozian curriculum gives the teacher the freedom to explore and critique these affective mechanisms, and not simply discount them. To end on a personal note, I have found this strategy to be useful in the TOK classroom, as many epistemological problems are intrinsically entwined with affective behaviours. It could be said that the empty ‘knower’ is not at fault if they do not understand the knowledge problem, but it is the affective and imaginative force that is present in the educational environment, and the place that we have properly called ‘school’.