… Consider the case of Kristin, who is four years old. She was teaching herself to use watercolors. As she painted, she began to think about the colors themselves. Sitting on her bed, talking to her father, she announced, “Dad, the world is all made of colors.”
Kristin’s father, who, as I happen to know, wants to make sense of it all as much as his four-year-old daughter did, liked Kristin’s hypothesis, and reacted positively. But, recognizing a difficulty, he asked her, “What about glass?”
Kristin thought for a moment. Then she announced firmly, “Colors and glass.”
This if from The Philosophy of Childhood by Gareth B. Matthews (1994):
… Much of philosophy involves giving up adult pretensions to know. The philosopher asks, “What is time, anyway?” when other adults assume, no doubt unthinkingly, that they are well beyond the point of needing to ask that question. They may want to know whether they have enough time to do the week’s shopping, or to pick up a newspaper. They may want to know what time it is, but it doesn’t occur to them to ask, “What is time?”
… A later anecdote from Kristin recalls another pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. Kristin was five, and learning how to read. She was learning to recognize syllables and to sound them out so as to be able to recognize words. She was quite proud of her success.
Again, sitting on her bed talking to her father, she commented, “I’m sure glad we have letters.”
Kristin’s father was somewhat surprised at that particular expression of gratitude. “Why?” he asked.
“Cause if there was no letters, there would be no sounds.” explained Kristin. “If there was no sounds, there would be no words … If there was no words, we couldn’t think … and if we couldn’t think, there would be no world.”
… Descartes taught us to do philosophy by “starting over.” Instead of assuming the correctness of what my teachers have taught me, or what the society around me seems to accept, I am to make a fresh beginning to see if I can show by some means of my very own that I really do know whatever it is I claim to know.
… It isn’t that “starting over” is all there is to doing philosophy. That isn’t true at all. But learning to be comfortable with “naive” questions is an important part of doing philosophy well.
-Julie
I like that a lot.
It’s not just philosophy that requires us to give up “adult pretensions to know”. All progress, all self discovery, all discovery of any kind, all creativity … all of them depend upon managing that trick, at least momentarily.
Right … that’s another £9.95 you’ve forced me to pay Amazon…
Comment by Felix — November 27, 2010 @ 5:48 pm
It definitely applies to photography (I tried to type “all” but lost my nerve …).
Comment by unrealnature — November 27, 2010 @ 7:18 pm