derbis.org

The things I’m looking for aren’t uncommon, but they are rare. They exist as moments in experience but they fade away and confound the compartments of a second-hand’s ticks and reflective thoughts. Like walking but without the steps.

Yeats called it the click of a well-made box. It’s how he knew when a poem was done, how he knew that he had the best words in their best order. There was that click.

I like to walk around the city. Streets go up and down, generally on the axes of a compass. They intersect and we call that an intersection. Clever. We could call it any number of other things, but we all know what is being said when one speaks of an intersection. We are a community of thought.

And at intersections I have a choice to make, which way it is that I will proceed. How many things bear on this decision? Too many to count is my guess. If I have somewhere to be, if I am in the mode of departure and destination, my options are refined. But if I’m just walking I draw on something else, something harder to see the logic of. Sometimes I’ll circle back around and come back to where I was previously. If I come to the same intersection again, maybe I’ll take a different path.

While I walk around amidst all of these right angles, if I pay attention not to where I’m going, but to where I am and how I am, I can sometimes feel this hum. And sometimes this hum seems like something way more basic, more primordial than all these angles and these intersections. The wind comes through the channel of buildings, my feet shuffle of their own supposedly autonomous rhythm, music from cars fades in and out, chatter from conversations caroms wordlessly, a bird squawks, and a horn honks. And the light too. It makes the leaves on the cherry trees glow green, it moves in sheets of white reflection off car windshields, and it feels warm on the back of my neck. But really even these things don’t themselves comprise the hum. The hum just lets them all make sense. Not in the way that the intersections make sense, but not differently either.

John Dewey calls philosophy an intellectual disrobing. It’s a discipline of severe thought that lets us take off the inherited vestments of culture, take a look at them away from the shadowless glare of apathy, and maybe decide which are worth putting back on, and which we should get rid of. Cast off, like something we hope will never come back in style. Bigotry and popped collars, for example.

But if I pay too much attention to the hum, I’m liable to be hit by a car. And if I have somewhere to go, somewhere to be at a certain time, then I need to pay attention which way I go when I get to an intersection.

Education has much to do with intersections. An educator helps us learn our way. Not like Google Maps or some GPS though. She doesn’t tell us how to get there, wherever “there” may be. She helps us to make sense of our options, to look at them outside the sheer immediacy of what within the limited range of view from the corner seems like an arbitrary choice. She wants us to see the continuity of choices that get us to one place or another. The choices are still ours. Her aim is just that our choices might keep us moving the direction we wish to go.

When the things we learn, and the way we learn them and the way we use them, come together, we feel that click. We are on our way toward where we are going. We feel that hum and it feels good. We are receptive and able to learn new things along the way. It’s like walking, but without the steps.

Welcome to the new derbis.org.

In case the tag-line of this site has left the topic unclear, let me restate that the writing here is concerned with philosophy and education. And philosophy of education. And education in philosophy.

I apologize for the cuteness of the foregoing statements. I will try not to let it happen again.

To begin, I would also like to offer a brief introduction of…myself. I am an amateur philosopher thinking of trying out for the pros. I have abiding interests in educational theory, social and political philosophies, as well as literature and more ethereal writings. It is my experience that blogs not held to a circumscribed domain of interest tend to lose momentum and then founder, and so I will do my best to keep the posting here “on topic”.

I currently live in Portland, Oregon, but am soon moving across the country to Brooklyn, New York. I have about five jillion thinks to do between now and then, and I hope that this blog will serve as a nice distraction slash focus for getting my philosophic language games polished.