Spinoza, experimentation and education: How things teach us

Abstract

This essay focuses on three primary issues i. The conceptual resources offered by Spinoza to challenge the idealism and perfectionism underpinning much educational theory and dominant educational imaginaries; ii. His descriptions of a non-ideal, practical and systematic approach to developing understanding that could be applied to educational theorising and practice; and iii. The potential for a different vision of education premised upon understanding the human as simply a part of nature. Decentring the human and treating affective and mental life as one would lines, planes, and bodies, as Spinoza claims we must in Ethics, invites another way of thinking about the politics and ethics of educational practice. Enacting experimental approaches to pedagogy produces new subjectivities and also invents new connections and relations between different bodies and different ideas. I argue that a properly Spinozist understanding of education would require it to be understood through practices of experimentation, in short, developing capabilities to compose relations in such a way that one also develops a the awareness of oneself as finite, dependent, vulnerable and as a part of nature. Seemingly paradoxically then, having understood how and that one is determined, and which bodies agree or disagree with one, one becomes more capable of agency and thus an ethical life.

Intersectional and Decolonial Perspectives on an Incorporeal Materialism: Towards an Elemental Philosophy of Art Education

“…As Grosz (2017) elaborates, “the capacity to be cut is a condition of being alive in a world in which metal can pierce flesh … but metal and flesh are bodies, even as cutting by the metal of the flesh is an event, and as such, incorporeal” (p. 42). Affects, in the Spinozan sense, can be understood as forces that circulate between bodies (causes) and incorporeals (effects) in ways that enliven (joy) or oppress (pain) a body's capacity to think and act in the world (O'Donnell, 2018).…”

“…Arts education is foundationally concerned with how bodies develop and share creative capacities to think and act in the world to transform individual and collective futures (c.f. Atkinson 2017; Naughton et al 2017;O'Donnell 2018O'Donnell , 2022, and this onto-ethical commitment to bodily capacitation and worldly transformation also sits at the heart of Grosz's philosophical project. This makes Grosz's work on the incorporeal potentially transformative for the philosophy and practice of arts education under current conditions of climatological upheaval, social inequity, and political unrest.…”