The Fundamentals of Gepeto's Philosophy of Education: neopragmatism and infancy in the postmodern world

Picture: 1554 School Stamp (Ghiraldelli Jr., P. Philosophy of Education. São Paulo: Atica, 2006).

I

In early 1996, in my country, Brazil, a mechanic, who had been accused of raping a 12‑year‑old girl, had his sentence commuted. There wasn't any concrete proof against him. Surely, I thought, the story would finish at this point. But the judge added a polemical statement, saying: ‘Nowadays, twelve year girls are no longer girls, they are women’. In the same week the judge's phrase was broadcast on a TV programme called ‘Fantastico’ of the ‘Globo Net’, a TV show that gets the highest ratings in Brazil on Sunday nights. The show promoted a `survey of public opinion' about the judge's phrase, and the people, by a slim majority, sided with the judge.

Some weeks later, Folha de Sāo Paulo, the major liberal newspaper of Brazil, organised a debate on the problem. Martha Suplicy, a congresswoman of the Workers' Party, argued against the judge's remark. She said: ‘girls that are twelve years old can have a body and even the behavior of young women, but they aren't young women, or adults, they are children’ (Folha de Sao Paulo, 27 July 1996, notebook 3, p. 2).

II

When the problem is to judge issues involving rights and childhood, nowadays two groups vie with one another. There is the group that understands the notion of childhood in terms of along period, of which the main feature is both pureness and innocence. Contesting this group's view, there is another group that assumes childhood as a period which, long or short, has several features, but none of which are innocence or essential goodness.

The conversations of the members of the first group appears in tune with a specific tradition of thought: exactly the tradition that we gain from Rousseau that broken conception of Saint Augustine and Descartes. As we know, Saint Augustine looked upon the child as a being linked to sin. If the child didn't have the language, then it didn't have reason, and reason was considered the divine condition of adulthood. Descartes understood childhood as a time in which the imagination and the senses were the main elements in a human being's life. For Descartes, the imagination and the senses confused our thought. After childhood, once we became adults, we would have difficulty using reason, because our minds could not learn to given up the senses and the imagination. Then, we would be in great trouble: we would be always in the wrong. Both Descartes and Augustine wanted human beings to emerge quickly from this condition. They wanted this condition ─ the condition of childhood ─ to be completed.

Rousseau broke this train of thought insofar as he understood the wrong, the false, and the corrupt, as fruits of our inability to judge but, instead of taking this inability as a condition of infancy, as a defect, he pointed out that the social adult man is someone who had lost this ability exactly when he grew out of infancy. Since the adult had given up the ‘sincerity of heart’, which was a specific feature of the child, he become alien to his human essence of the Good Savage.

So, if infancy was the Enemy Number One of Philosophy and, thereby, of Truth and Goodness, under Rousseau, instead, it would be the sine qua non of Philosophy, in that infancy would be the necessary innocence capable of sheltering the truth and participating in the world with the right moral attitudes.

The conversation of the second group, I think, can be shown by the spirit of Nabokov's book and tales, which can be viewed in opposition to anti‑Rousseauism. We can think about Lolita. But I would prefer to take other text, without the same sex connotations, to make my example clear and without the stigma which has become attached to Lolita (especially now, with the movie Lolita II without doubt a beautiful film). So I shall talk about another text, namely, ‘Perfection’ (Nabokov, 1996). It is the story of a solitary boy, David and of his teacher, Ivanov. Nabokov writes in a way that the reader soon comes to love the boy. He creates in the reader a romantic affection for the boy. The lessons of the teacher were romantic lessons: he talks about nature and about the loss of man because the man came out from the forest and so on.

During the tale, Nabokov creates a romance full of nature and love for the boy and love for an innocent infancy. David isn't Lolita: he is not morally dubious. So, Nabokov can finish the tale in an abrupt way, catching the reader in a trap. During a day at the beach, the boy feigns drowning. The teacher, a sick man suffering from cardiac problems, runs and jumps in the water. He makes a tremendous effort, fights and dies thinking that he didn't manage to save the boy. The boy emerges from the water without guilt. (Lolita was never guilty by herself.) Ivanov, the teacher (preceptor), dies because he didn't realize that it was child's play‑a cruel play. Is there anything more cruel than a child?

III

To speak in a Nabokovian way can seem subversive of the classical notion of infancy‑the Rousseaunian notion. But, really, this is a false subversion because it isn't anything other than an inverse Rousseanian notion. It isn't a radical version that runs counter to the Rousseaunian notion. For it follows the idea of the child and childhood as something natural. Infancy wouldn't be innocent, but this wouldn't mean that the new notion would be saying that childhood would be rid of the destiny put by nature.

I think that from at least 200 years ago, that is, since Hegel, some Western people started to talk about events in the world in a different way, considering them as made by history. So, we can begin to draw out a third strand in talk about children. New sentiments linked with this new way of talking about what to do with children, to benefit adults and the community, gained some support from city people in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In conversations at the start of the twenty‑first century, infancy already appeared as something constructed. A construction that linked city and school. The tale Pinocchio's Adventure is a narrative of this kind (Collodi, 1992).

It is well known that the tale begins when a joiner, Gepeto, gets a piece of speaking wood and makes it into a dummy. Pinocchio, the wooden dummy, isn't, of course, a child. The best remark comes from the Speaking Cricket who says that Pinocchio `has a head of wood'. To be a true boy it would be necessary for him to be good to his father and to others, to have responsibility and, finally, to have his own conscience. The Fairy wants to make him a true boy, but only if he shows that he already has those qualities. To act on the nature (the speaking wood) and on the work of the father (the dummy), the Fairy needed the dummy to live as a true boy.

Gepeto knew very well what he had to do to make Pinocchio a true boy. Pinocchio should go to school, because it is at school in the city where true boys go. Where is the school? In the city. School and city, then, are responsible for the most important part of the construction of childhood. However, they also bring an open field of possibilities ─ historical possibilities in which childhood can happen but also cannot happen. This is clear when Pinocchio goes to the city and wants to go to school. He meets the Cat and Fox, which are inhabitants of the city but aren't citizens. They divert Pinocchio and show him the other possibilities of the city. There is the possibility to go out and to change the city. Pinocchio experiments visiting cities without citizenship, places where the tyrant is the unique law, and Pinocchio ends up knowing the city of the donkey‑children and almost ends up becoming a donkey.

We can see that Pinocchio is a personage contra‑Nabokov and contra‑Rousseau. The Pinocchio of Collodi isn't essentially good or bad, just a bit of wood. Different from the work of other authors, the city of Collodi is merged into a historical and natural world, but it doesn't follow any law of History or of Nature. In it, anything can happen. If Pinocchio exhibits good responsible behaviour, then he can use this epoch of his life as a trampoline to say `I am a true boy'. At the end of the tale, we know, he becomes a real boy insofar as he resists the elements that wanted to make him someone without citizenship. Despite the Cat and the Fox and other characters who led him astray and got him into trouble, Pinocchio develops behaviour that in the father's and Fairy's eyes indicate responsibility and goodness.

We, in the West, since the end of the eighteenth century and still more in the nineteenth century, began to describe infancy and childhood as a natural thing and, following a model that had pretensions of uniqueness, fell into a paradox, because we also began to use other descriptions, like those in The Adventures of Pinocchio. In this story, childhood is cut out in a way less rigid, less dependent on natural laws than on historical constructions. Through this second kind of description, we see childhood as something that gains several currents in its constructions: cultural forces, completely contingent, among them, the city and school become very important.

IV

But the historicism sketched in Collodi's tale is very ‘soft’ compared with the descriptions and vocabularies that have emerged more recently, in the last 40 years. More than talking about infancy as something that is natural and historical, we began to talk about an idea of `natural infancy' as something historically made, perhaps even invented. Philippe Aries, in the beginning of the 1960s, taught us a way to talk about infancy which was different from notions used by the two groups mentioned in the first paragraphs. Aries followed a third strand of thinking developed by Hegel and Collodi. He speaks, still, of the ‘discovery of childhood’ and so confuses the idea of the ‘malting of childhood’, which would be better if we wanted to follow Hegel and Collodi. With Aries, we still could not think of childhood as a natural stage of human beings but one discovered by intellectuals. Then, the consequences would be clear: childhood will happen, but it will happen in a more correct way if we comply with what nature has programmed. We would have to find out what nature `had programmed' and hence make all this easier.

Aries said this, but the spirit of his book is not based on this theme. He treats the notion of childhood as something that must be made . . . invented from new ways to speak and to feel by adults considering children. And how this changed behaviour about what to do with children. In Pinocchio, the school and city are elements that compete to make the doll a ‘true boy’. That is, Aries put in the scene completely contingent cultural forces, which are present and help forge childhood. For Aries, in a radical way, the notions that put differences between a boy and an adult appear as a creation‑a practical creation from conversation and affection that the urban groups developed to consider sons.

To lead Aries's historicism forward is, then, to admit that the classical idea of childhood ─ the idea received from Rousseau and Romanticism ─ isn't a unique historical thing but the inverse idea is also an historical event, that is, its inversion made by Nabokov is, of course, also an invention. Some inventions side with or defend Rousseau and Martha Suplicy and others defend Nabokov and what the Cat and Fox thought: the children are ─ normal or made of wood ─ all bad. If we take Aries's historicism seriously, we will see that philosophy or literature or science are just new descriptions. They don't permit us to measure them; for example, if we want to get a proper description it would be ‘the truth about the true boy’.

What do we mean if we talk about children this way? There are some people who say: people who speak in this way don't believe that ‘the rights of the children’ ─ all those rights of protection which have developed in Western democratic culture ─ can be said to be legitimate because such rights are founded on theoretical truths of ‘what infancy is’. This would mean that we wouldn't want to explain and justify the rights of children based upon ‘the true definition of a true boy’. But, then, the rights of infancy are condemned‑are they? We can say `yes' or `no'. How? Maybe Gepeto can teach us something about this.

Gepeto didn't know exactly what it was to be a ‘true boy’, except by reference to what all the reasonable people of the city always said, that a boy should be good and responsible, a boy should have consciousness and ... not a ‘head of wood’. What he knew was that the city gave a space for all the boys and girls. At school, Gepeto knew, Pinocchio would live as a boy‑really. Gepeto didn't expect to find on the door of the school a notice such as `here we don't accept dummies of wood, only true boys', and, of course, he didn't see anything like this. An historical and cultural accord among the people of the city held a special place for the children‑this place was a ... right of infancy, and the people didn't mind if the children had heads of bone, wood or whatever. Children should be there, and this didn't have any link with questions of the kind ‘what is a true boy?’.

However, some people believe this story doesn't tell us anything about the `rights of childhood'. Rights, for them, need a basis and there isn't an historical basis because a basis is a basis, and can't be changed by the mood of the people of the city. ‘Rights of childhood’ are, for them, secure rights because they emanate from the exact answer to the question ‘what is a true boy and a true girl?’.

V

If we try rigidly to guarantee these ‘rights’ by appeal to something essential about the nature of children then our children face a danger. If we have a rigid definition of ‘infancy’, ‘childhood’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘child’, we will make doctors, psychologists, priests, scientists and philosophers very happy. If we have a fundament that makes our answer about ‘what is the true boy?’ secure we will make all these people very happy. They believe that the ‘rights of infancy’ are guaranteed, and that such rights weren't secure in the city of Gepeto. I believe exactly in the inverse, and will tell another story to show this. Or, better, I will quote two parts of a beautiful book, written by Andrew Sullivan, the main character of the story (Sullivan, 1996).

I remember that when I was seven or eight years old I watched TV and saw a man with his chest naked and I felt a desire so intense for him that I decided that I would be a doctor. Then, I thought, I could make him sleep, because I would use drugs, and I could lay down on him. I soon realized that I would be found out and I would be in trouble. I didn't sleep that night and I ended up as confused and desiring as I was in the beginning. (pp. 14‑15)
I clearly remember a new beginning after a long summer, when I was fifteen years old. For the first time I returned to change my clothes in the vestibule together with a boy that I had been in love with. Yet, since the vacations he had grown up and was strong and his chest was covered with hair. He wasn't a boy anymore. He, without knowing anything, took his
shirt off and did a strip‑tease. I lost my breath, literally, caught by desire. In moments as this, the adolescent gay learns a kind of control and sublimation, a moment of self foolishness and self contempt which never will be given up by his consciousness. (p. 18)

The reader may wonder why I have quoted parts of Sullivan's book. I want to talk about the reactions of the people, men, women ... and gays to reading such quotations. I describe these responses in two ways.

If innocent childhood is true childhood, and if we take erotic desire as something that stains that innocence, then the gay child of Sullivan's text isn't a child, we would think ─ our argument would indicate that the child can't possess innocence, the kernel of childhood. If this is the case, then, the child can't enjoy ‘Rights of Infancy’, a thing that we, literate people from the West, have believed as being of value since the unfolding of the ‘Bourgeois Revolution’, the Enlightenment and so on. If we take the erotic desire as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ among children, small changes will begin to occur. Perhaps nothing. For we can think that Sullivan's parents must and can be happy with a son like Sullivan, but this doesn't mean that we are also willing to accept that our sons might be like Sullivan. We can accept Sullivan without accepting that we are equal to him, that we have erotic desires like him. In this case, we can accept Sullivan without a sense of solidarity, perhaps tolerance, but certainly only by acquiescence. Sullivan, here, wouldn't be ‘one of us’. I don't think that is enough.

But, perhaps, there are other motives that exist in our thoughts and decisions. We can read Sullivan and think in a different way. We might enlarge our notion of behaviour about the joy of rights of childhood after we ourselves make a re‑description of our infancy. We might remember that when we were children we also had erotic homosexual or heterosexual experiences, and we had desires as intense as Sullivan did. But, in that age, we didn't think that we were anything but children, because the picture of children then was based on popular notions: children read comics strip, we ate candies and cakes and lived for playing, even if we had to work. However, some of us might remember a boy or a girl that lets herself or himself be intimate with someone of the ‘same sex’. He or she did not lose the `rights of childhood' but something worse occurred: he or she lost his or her own infancy. The school is a probable place for this occurrence. And the school is a special place for re‑descriptions: if the school re‑described him or her as someone that wasn't a child, he or she would have to make themselves something else, but not children‑how do we talk about ‘rights of children’ in the postmodern city if we describe children as non‑children? So, many schools don't comply with what Gepeto expected from them: on the door wasn't written ‘here we don't accept a boy or girl with a head of wood’.

In the first reaction, Aries's historicism doesn't have a place. In this case there is still the old essentialism. In the second reaction, we are closer to a democratic postmodern position. We deepen our historicism without denying love by democracy; instead, I think that in a way we collaborate with democratic culture.

To re‑describe our childhood is to consider the Sullivan boy as ‘one of us’. And this shows us that we are using our solidarity as a link for the compassion made from memory and imagination, and less of theoria and less too of pity. This means, considering childhood, that if we live in the postmodern world described by Lyotard the world without metanarratives ─ we can't open our hands and release the democratic gains of modern Western civilization, as, for example, ‘the rights of children’. I believe that Richard Rorty (1989) would take this behaviour as typical of younger ‘liberal ironists’.

Gepeto walked in this direction. I think that we would do better, like Gepeto: if the school and the city are the places where my reasonable friends say that I must put children, and if I have a child here, my Pinocchio, then I will look for the city and the school. Maybe I won't find the city or school. Maybe someone will suggest that my Pinocchio is just a dummy. All this can happen. I will return to my reasonable friends. Gepeto didn't have other things to trust. We don't have other things to trust, we have to talk about this and talk about that. This was the single fundament for Gepeto, and he took it. What could he do?

References

ARIES, P. (1981) História social da infancia a da familia (Rio de Janeiro, Editora Guanabara). COLLODI, C. (1992) As aventuras de Pinoquio (Sao Paulo, Ed. 6es Paulinas).
Para especialistas, lei sobre estupro deve ser alterada, Folha de Sao Paulo, 27 July 1996, notebook 3, p. 2.
NABOKOV, V. (1996) Perfeição (Sao Paulo, Companhia das Letras).
RoK'rY, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). SULLIVAN. N, A. (1996) Praticamente normal (Sao Paulo, Companhia das Letras).

Paulo Ghiraldelli Jr., PhD University of São Paulo. He is philosopher and editor of Contemporary Pragmatism together with John Shook.

About evil: reading Adorno in Rorty style

Before the 1970s, we would call a film “heavy” when it had scenes of physical violence and/or sex. Today we have another meaning for the word. A “heavy” film is a “good film” with breathtaking and dark drama. We have had a revolution in the way we describe films. We have had a revolution in the images and vocabulary of the films themselves.The image of Evil in films has also changed. The Nazi German, bloodthirsty Indian, sleazy Mexican, cold-blooded Soviet officer, treacherous Japanese are all part of the fantasy created by the North American film industry. Today, however, the figure of Evil is much more sophisticated. In Saving Private Ryan Evil is “the war” and not the Germans or Nazism. In Dances with Wolves Evil is the “cruelty against nature and the unusual”, but not the Indian or paleface. In Philadelphia Evil is not AIDS or the owner of the company who fires the sick employee, but rather a new kind of lack of respect for civil rights. In The Insider Evil is not the tobacco industry but rather the lack of trust and companionship between colleagues and in the home.

Evil in films has become more abstract and, for this very reason, more insidious and suffocating. Evil has become much more Evil. Once it was unrecognizable, now it may be recognized any and everywhere.

In the academic milieu, the contemporary text on Evil that has most survived is “Post-Auschwitz Education”, by Theodor Adorno. Adorno, a colleague of Max Horkheimer, absorbed from his friend the style that is so essential for the text, enduring long after its outdated Marxism: the Metaphysics of Schopenhauer’s Evil.

Hence, some people say that the reason for the success of Adorno’s writing lies in “fact itself”, that is, in the concentration camp: the project that included Auschwitz did not involve punishment, struggle or war, but extermination, premeditated genocide, in conjunction with dubious scientific experiments on human guinea pigs, remorselessly executed. Any text, then, that was to assimilate the grandeur and endurance of the Evil of Auschwitz would also possess grandeur and endurance. This argument is no less strong when justifying the success of Adorno’s text. Adorno hit the mark when he did not regard Auschwitz as a mere but rather abstract historical episode, and thus understood Evil as it appears in today’s films: insidious, with no return, suffocating, faceless... without redemption — almost without redemption!

But Adorno’s success was accompanied by a number of problems for which he was not prepared. Having once seen metaphysical Evil, he created a sketchy hope for the end of Evil in just as metaphysical a framework. Evil, even when it touches everything, might not have touched man’s soul. Almost like Rousseau, Adorno wagered that in the human heart there exists a metaphysical recording that cannot be corrupted, and, at the right moment, would warn its host: “no!” “don’t do it”, “don’t agree to it” — “no!”.

Philosophers who have one foot more in the 21st than 20th century, that is, philosophers in the same vein as Michel Foucault or Richard Rorty, do not believe in the awakening of this “voice of conscience” in which Adorno believed. Nevertheless, if Foucault were alive today, perhaps he would not attribute so much importance to “Dances with Wolves”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “The Insider” or even “Philadelphia”. If he were to encounter intellectuals praising these films, perhaps he would only think that they were lukewarm attempts by a sentimental philosopher to, like Adorno, make the human heart say “no!” to Evil. Or even worse: perhaps he would see this as the frosting on a cake whose ingredients would once again be pure cheap patriotism of forsaken North Americans. Yet a Rortian cannot think like this: he will surely see that such films arouse nothing at all but are accompanying a major semantic revolution — they are “heavy” films. And they are exactly like that to the extent that they can re-describe the world and, therefore, induce behaviors that can say “no!” to Evil, even when it is faceless and there is nothing to arouse in man.

Paulo Ghiraldelli Jr. is philosopher and editor of Contemporary Pragmatism together with John Shook.

Socrates 1922 by Brancusi

Constanti Brancusi, Romanian artist.
"Socrates" - 1922
It is a video-art about Brancusi and his Socrates. Enjoy.
Brancusi's "Socrates" is a fantastic arwork. You can see: MOMA.
Note that it is in SAP Socrates entry.

"Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them. " - Brancusi.