“We need to foster and nourish the ‘inborn Thou’ by strengthening children’s relations to the world around them and other people. The only way to restore the inborn Thou to our society is to allow children to develop their intuitive knowledge by allowing them full reign to their imaginations in the arts and sciences and in doing philosophy with them.” –from Maria daVenza Tillmanns’ Philosophy Now article: Children, Intuitive Knowledge & Philosophy
Now there is a lot to unpack here and this, potentially (because it reflects on many of the things I’ve been concerned with in my process), could give me give me a couple of days worth of rhizomes as well as a letter to the editor. And given the criteria by which I tend to work (what I can use –steal even), this pretty much qualifies as a good piece of writing. I highly recommend it, should you have access.
That said, while there are many reasons to like the article (many connections with aspects of my process), I would start one of the most prevalent: the way it puts some shine on the answer to the question of the month, what is the future of mankind, that I will have the pleasure of publishing in the next issue. My point was that mankind has reached an important evolutionary milestone in that we either make the leap from the competitive evolutionary legacy (that which involves the base of our brains (our immediate self interest (utilizing its higher cognitive functions strictly for its purposes) to the cooperative: that in which our baser impulses see it in their interest to work in tandem with the cognitive functions and their recognition of the interests of others, including the other of our environment. And as I made clear, unless we make this evolutionary leap, we risk destroying ourselves as a species along with all other species of life.
And where better to start than children as Tillmanns suggests? Right? I further note the overlap between Tillmanns’ agenda and that of continental philosophy (especially as concerns Gille Deleuze via Bergson (and the more practical and accessible American approach via Pragmatism –especially as practiced by Rorty. Tillmanns poses their position against the analytic and the tyranny of the functional (will try to get to this later (by propping up the value of intuition and Play. And it is through intuition and Play (what Tillmann refers to (via Buber (as relation (that we come to concrete understandings of our environment. And it is in this very spirit that continentals tend to work, especially in the case of Deleuze who offers an, at first, indecipherable text for the sake of a kind of Play in which the reader is allowed to engage with it creatively by their own terms which are always anchored in the reality of the text itself.
Tillmanns’ point pretty much comes down to what I have believed for some time now: that all great achievements must start in Play and return to it frequently. In other words, it must be rooted in something that a child could do.