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1、Journal of Philosophy of EducationVolume 38Issue 4Page 683- November 2004BooknotesBob Davis, University of GlasgowEducation is regularly faulted these days for all of the many things it does not do. Politicians criticise its failure to address everything from diet, through sexual health, to parentin
2、g skills (whatever they are). Somewhat more reflectively, perhaps, philosophers such as Nel Noddings have pointed to the absence in much contemporary learning and teaching of a proper concern for experiences we regularly assume to be central to the attainment of the good life, such as the appreciati
3、on of nature or the understanding of companionship. At a recent conference in Edinburgh, Reasons of the Heart, devoted to the unusual subject of Education and Myth, Iris Yob made an eloquent plea for a revival of a sense of the sacred in our schoolsin everything from the architecture of our building
4、s to the celebration of the cycles of the year. The growing interest in spirituality in certain parts of the literature may prompt some teachers and academics to reach for their proverbial revolvers, especially when the womens lifestyle magazine, Cosmopolitan, sententiously announces to its presumab
5、ly relieved readership the appointment of its first Spirituality Editor. While it is tempting merely to dismiss passing fashions of this kind, it may be worth pausing to consider some of the more serious questions that lie behind them. These questions were once the lifeblood of learning and teaching
6、 and their reappearance in the attenuated forms of popular journalism and therapy literature might just be an indirect warning to current educational thought that it has excluded or devalued them at some cost to its claims on public attention.A serious and intellectually vigorous inflection of the r
7、enewed interest in spirituality has, for the last few years, accompanied its more vernacular expressions. Since Philip Blonds importanteven confrontationalRoutledge volume of 1998, the academically accepted term for much of this thought has been post-secular philosophy, his title phrase (Routledge,
8、1998). It is a term that enrages some, with its teleological assumptions and its arguably arrogant posture towards the secular understanding that supposedly preceded it. Regina Schwartz (a contributor to Blonds original collection) prefers the more conciliatory spatial metaphor of journeying outward
9、s into terrain that is simultaneously unfamiliar and intimately recognisable. In a new collection, Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and Theology Approach the Beyond (Routledge, 2004), Schwartz brings together several of the writers who contributed to the original Blond bookincluding Jean-Luc Ma
10、rion, Kevin Hart and Graham Wardbut modulates the manifesto tone of post-secular philosophy by encouraging her contributors to focus on the experience of the transcendent, the mysterious and what Charles Taylor terms the cosmic imaginary in much more local, cautious explorations of literature, art a
11、nd religion. Taylors opening essay, A Place for the Transcendent, sets the agenda for Schwartzs collection by questioning the coherence of a human good radically cut off from transcendence and rejecting the current dominance of an attitude of disengagement associated with the discipline of rationali
12、ty (p. 10). Later in the collection, an important essay by the late Emmauel Levinas lays claims to transcendence as a validating context for ethicsan ethics, Levinas suggests, that is excellence and elevation beyond being. Ethics is not a moment of being; it is otherwise and better than being, the v
13、ery possibility of the beyond. (p. 39) The necessarily adversarial tone of Blonds volume is quite deliberately subdued under Schwartzs editorship by a quieter, more watchful form of academic reserve, which, while resolute in its critique of the historic division between immanence and transcendence,
14、attends to the postmodern possibilities for its repair. Doubtful of reasons totalizing claims to mastery of the objects of knowledge, morality and the seemingly transparent, self-presenting subject of much postmodern polemic, the various contributors to the volume patiently examine the possible sour
15、ces of a renewed commerce with the transcendent as disclosed in an ambitiously diverse range of cultural products, from the erotic sublime of modern love poetry to contemporary reinterpretations of the Book of Job.In one sense, this is heady stuff, and arguably outwith the scope of contemporary educ
16、ational practice, with its exacting attachment to relevance and experience. Nevertheless, immersion in literature of this kind leaves an abiding sense of the inadequacy of much that currently passes for everyday learning and teaching. The curricular areas of Religious and Moral Education, in particu
17、lar (and with some notable exceptions), seem routinised and desiccated when set against the backdrop of these ideas. Why do these questions consistently fail to make their way into our curriculum in even those subject areas supposedly designed to accommodate them? The attention in Schwartzs collecti
18、on to specific images, texts and historical experiencesseveral of them standard resource materials found in schools, such as Shakespeares Othello, images of Fra Angelico paintings and television advertisementsreassuringly grounds the complexities of theory in conventional objects of educational stud
19、y and shows how they quite naturally prompt exploration of the most profound human concerns, if only allowed to do so.David Jaspers reflection on the role of the desert in his The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art and Culture (Blackwell, 2004) adopts a similarly persuasive strategy: examining
20、 the poetics of the desert as an experience in scripture, theology, art, film and literature in order to probe the metaphorical power of the desert as a locus of theological, ethical and ontological speculation. The immediacy and accessibility of much of the cultural material in Jaspers study may in
21、itially suggest that the book is no more than a survey of desert texts, of the sort beloved by hard-pressed teachers struggling to find a unifying theme for an advanced, thematically integrated programme of work. The range of Jaspers relatively slender monograph is certainly as vast as his subject m
22、atter demands. There is, however, much more going on here. The Sacred Desert is a book about paradox: the paradox of an almost archetypally empty environment that simultaneously teems with meaning; the contradiction of withdrawal to the site least hospitable to human existence that teaches unconditi
23、onal hospitality to the other; the coexistence of ultimate absence with the presence of the God who may be, indeed, precisely a figuration of that absence. Jaspers study of the myriad ways in which we encounter, flee from and take possession of the desert, from the Bible to the second war in Iraq, e
24、schews a simple or romantic dialectic of civilization and wilderness. It endeavours, instead, to recover the language of a theological humanism, an impossible necessity, where oppositions collapse and a radical decentring of the self occursone which enables a redescription of the world (p. 174) to t
25、ake place as the nakedness of the desert painfully releases the ego from the temptations of theological and philosophical hubris. Towards the end of the book, Jasper engages with Derridas notion of the Force of Law, the originary violence by which Law legitimates its interpretive authority. Jasper s
26、ees vital parallels between Derridas insight and the pre-monastic Desert Fathers trek into the desert to find a silence that is not exterior to language but its very heart. This is a vision, he warns educators, that may very well be unteachable, even incommunicable, because it can be found only in c
27、omplete solitude: For only in such solitude can be discovered the true nature of human being understood as Total Presence only in the utter indifference to life is life truly discovered (p. 161). The barrenness of the desert recalls, again, Levinas equally compelling invitation to cross the boundary
28、 into the Other, where our own radical estrangement from all that we take to be authenticatingconfederates, enemies, even the self-emptying Godis exposed and where the silent indifference of the desert dissolves the desperate claims over us of power and fear.Jaspers book shares with Schwartzs Transc
29、endence a restless dissatisfaction with much that passes for the current humanistic understanding of religion, art and spirituality. It remains unconvinced by the various appropriations of experiences and perceptions that, by their very existence, call into question the dubious treaties struck betwe
30、en the humanities as they are now increasingly organised and the larger goals of education. The Sacred Desert is peppered with criticism of Western Christian annexations of the Eastern desert, as both other peoples living space and as symbolic cultural terrain. It is also vexed by the desire of some
31、 to see in religious symbolism a pattern of belief and conduct to which our institutions must simplistically return. Jaspers is not by any means a conventionally pious or devotional book, nor does it champion religion in any traditional or dogmatic sense. Indeed, a central impulse of the book is a r
32、eligious response to the death of God. The Sacred Desert does, nevertheless, echo Schwartzs contention that the study of religion needs to recover some of its original desert subversiveness if it is to distinguish itself decisively from the forms of comparative spirituality that too often trivialise
33、 and exoticise the curriculum of multicultural (religious) education. The pursuit of enchantment is not politically, culturally or religiously innocent. The literature that Jasper discusses dramatises the conflicts to which the journeys into and through the desert necessarily give rise, arguing that
34、, for even an inescapably post-religious society, the issues raised by such nomadism replay the deepest preoccupations and probings of both religious faith and religious doubt.It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the recent bestsellers in childrens literature, from the pen of legendary c
35、hildrens writer Alan Garner, is a novel obsessed with religion and with the clash between one residual religious culture and another, emergent one. Thursbitch (Vintage, 2003; pbk, 2004) is a really quite extraordinary book, rooted in both historical fact and the contours of the English landscape, pa
36、st and present. Originally conceived as a childrens novel, it has struck a resonance with adult readers, not as part of the Rowling-inspired kidult phenomenon in childrens fiction, nor as fantasy-action escapism, but as a story ablaze with the mysteries of belonging and enchantment, of religion as a
37、 complex series of negotiations between human beings and the natural (and supernatural) environments they inhabit. Thursbitch tells the story of John Turner, an eighteenth-century packman, whose death on the snowbound Pennine hilltracks leaves an emotional legacy that powerfully attracts the interes
38、t of two twenty-first century researchers, Ian and Sal. Their investigations into the life and death of John Turner become a gradual disclosure of the mysteries of the valley of Thursbitch and the archaic pagan history hidden in its seemingly sentient landscape and in its religiously-charged past. F
39、or Garner, history, language and faith converge in the spiritual and material marginalisation of a people and a region by the implacable forces of historical and economic change. In the name of a new centralising religio-political authority, that by its very nature foreshadows the advent of modernit
40、y, an aggressive puritan Christianity comes at last to the isolated valley spearheading a religious regime change and bent fanatically upon the erasure of the secret chthonic animal cults through which people, landscape and cosmos have been symbolically reconciled from time immemorial. The final for
41、m of this new order is not, however, a triumphant institutional Church (averse though Garner remains to credal Christianity), but the secular modernity in which Garner strands his twenty-first century protagonists, Ian and Salderacinated, technologised, vaguely diseased and uncomprehending of the di
42、sfigured landscape to which it demands access and which reluctantly falls subject to the instruments of Ian and Sals new religion, science. For all the subterranean darkness of his vision, and the violence of his life and death, a chastened Ian and Sal come to revere the figure of John Turner, event
43、ually viewing him as the magus of a spiritual health from which they feel themselves cut off and for the loss of which they feel indefinably responsible.Liberal educational opinion might find important aspects of Garners myth-making disturbing, and several influential reviewers have dissented from i
44、ts suggestive submission to the instinctual and the irrational in human affairs. Thursbitch, however, is not a refusal of history in the name of myth, nor merely nostalgia for premodernity. As a work of fiction, it strives to complete a task educators have traditionally prized in imaginative literat
45、ure: reintegrating the fissiparous elements of nature and culture, reaching out to heal the divisions between immanence and transcendence and the traumas inflicted on its members by industrial society, even when they are least aware of their own injuries. It performs this work in ways that both Regi
46、na Schwartz and David Jasper would surely endorse: not by a simplistic repudiation of modernity but by a restoration of the imaginative faculties through which modernity is to be understood and reformed.Pat Kanes long awaited manifesto for a different way of living (subtitle), the boldly-titled The
47、Play Ethic (Macmillan, 2004) is also concerned with the reformation and redesign of the way we live, and also aspires to reconnects us with suppressed and devalued elements of our collective emotional and cultural history. The Play Ethic is a deliberate rejoinder to the work ethic, the enduring lega
48、cy of which is one of the principal targets of Kanes polemic. Indeed, it is possible to see in Kanes ancestral immigrant Catholicism one of the sources of his ongoing (and admittedly oversimplified) quarrel with the Presbyterian emphasis on labour and production. This is a manifesto vulnerable in ma
49、ny places to misunderstanding, not because of any serious shortcomings in the argumentwhich is substantialbut because of the popular misconceptions that cling obstinately to the key terms Kane wishes to debate. The Play Ethic is, in fact, a sophisticated critique of what we now habitually term late industrial society and its obsession with the idea of work. The book fuels its critique by elaborating a rigorous theory of play that skilfully picks its way through the major theorists and studiou
