The Wonder Wheel, Pinhole Photograph | Chris Moffett 2007
Plato famously affirms that philosophy begins with wonder. This strikes me as at least revisionist. The comment of an old philosopher reminiscing on distant beginnings. Even if one imagines arche less as “beginning” than “principle.” Are we to believe that philosophy is really so dreamy eyed?
And is not this aspect of philosophy, at least, the secret dream that drives even our most pragmatic educational endeavors? So that today, even as we correct our student’s math word problems, we must imagine it as part of a wondrous gift. Even, or especially, if we feel otherwise.
Jadedness or wonder, are these are options? And what if we were to look past beginnings?
This makes me think of Nietzsche in Untimely Meditations: “the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture.” (longer excerpt and attribution here: ).
And of Deleuze and Foucault, whose attempts to overturn the revisionism of academic philosophy -Foucault with his power-knowledge dyad, so similar to the wonder (power) – jadedness (knowledge) alternative you pose; Deleuze both in practice, with his audacious, voracious creativity, and in theory, as in the interview you quote from here: – both striving to exit from that vicious cycle of history, which I suspect we might equate with education, if only as it seems increasingly to emerge as the matrix of the disciplinary apparatuses of whose at once increasingly integrated and distributed functionalities it retroactively establishes itself the arche (amplifying the ambiguity you mention).
And I think there is an exit, but it’s not a simple escape in the classical manner of a ‘getting-out’ (although this seems to be an increasingly necessary component of it). Rather, it seems to be more of a ‘getting-in’.
The old question of whether to fight against ‘the system’ from without or to ‘change it from within’ springs to mind; as the system grows to encompass all opposition, so too do its insides ‘open up’, making it less and less a matter of either dejectedly giving up on knowledge (and giving up power to established knowledges) or forcefully seizing power (by smashing old knowledges and founding new ones); more and more one of walking the fine tight-rope line between these two extremes…
In this case I guess ‘looking past beginnings’ would have to include ‘seeing past principles’; with the sense of ‘arche’ here expanding to encompass all schematics, all definite plans and forms, at least potentially. Troubling them, and making the lines of their diagrams shimmer like a heat wave. It seems to me that we could use a little more heat right about now.
Mmm, yes. Tight ropes and heat waves. Something worth exploring. Although I wonder how much the tightrope effect is itself a mode of control. Fields of tightrope walkers too preoccupied to breath. A lonely affair.
What’s that short story by Kafka of the man on the line pushed by the forces of history from front and back, dreaming of reprieve?
Still… You are speaking to a dreamer of skill…
It is interesting to think if, as you put it, “the old question” of fighting from outside or in, might be shifting its sense. Perhaps it is just as much a kind of irreverence for the traditional lines in the sand.
“Do I contradict myself, very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes…” -Whitman