What’s the earliest age for taking up philosophy? Philosophy knows no age or occupational restrictions. Aristotle joined Plato’s Academy at 17. Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus was almost 30 when he found his teacher Ammonius Saccas. In the 13th century, philosophy was taught at the faculty of art (underpinning the medieval post-secondary education system) with a student body aged 15-16. Thomas Aquinas was around 15 when he entered the studium generalle (university) in Naples to study, among other subjects, Aristotle’s natural science and philosophy.
Armand Jean du Plessis, the future Cardinal-Duke of Richelieu and of Fronsac, was sent to the College of Navarre at the age of 9. As a third-year student, he read Aristotle in the original and wrote essays on his works (aged then 13 or 14). Hegel was around 19 when he studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Charles Peirce was 16 when he started reading the Critique, two hours every day, for more than three years, discussing Kant’s ideas with his father, a prominent mathematician and adherent of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy. Those sufficiently familiar with Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Kant’s Critique know what reading such books at an early age is all about.
These days, a three-year-old kid is bound to pose philosophic questions (usually starting with “Why is that…” A conscious attitude to philosophy develops at 13-15 years of age. More often than not, the earliest philosophic questions arise from quality belles-lettres, movies, and life experience.
On December 5, 2015, I was on the jury of the Second All-Ukrainian High School Philosophy Contest (formally known as “Olympiad”). The jury was tasked with reading and assessing 8-10-graders’ essays. I read them and saw more quotes from Hollywood blockbusters than fiction literature. Personal experience – like falling in love, making friends, and being betrayed for the first time, trying to realize one’s place or calling in this world – is the second key factor in shaping one’s philosophic interest (as well as a source of creative inspiration).
I enjoyed reading quite a few students’ essays on that occasion. Why? Let’s say because the TV and reading audiences perceive the information they are fed –commercials, YouTube videos, books, newspapers, magazines, and so on – in different ways. Words in print activate a certain part of your brain responsible for both logical and image-bearing perception. Reading Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jules Verne’s In Search of the Castaways, chapters from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, one is captivated by the plot, building logical links between separate parts of the text, actively [mentally] reconstructing the realities committed to paper. Each reader becomes a co-author, getting actively involved in every scene. The part of your brain responsible for thinking keeps ticking during the reading process.
Visual information is received in an altogether different manner. In his book The Assault on Reason, Al Gore notes: “The visual imagery on television can activate parts of the brain involved in emotions in a way that reading about the same event cannot.” Television (and other kinds of video data) offers a finished product, a fixed perception of the reality. By the same token, the screen versions of the novels mentioned above, however professionally made, simplify the writer’s original plot, turning it into another box-office action hit, with the original story interpreted the producer’s way.
I’m certainly not against the screening of literary classics, filmmaking, computer games or DVDs with lectures. I do realize all their advantages and recommend quite a few of them as reference sources for my students. What I’m driving at is the formulation of certain competences that are important today and will remain important in the near future.
High schools and universities should formulate competences that will remain important in the near future, including analytical and creative thinking, an ability to argue one’s point and make the right decision. In order to do so, special emphasis should be placed on the development of the following three outwardly simple skills: (1) slow thoughtful reading, (2) being able to formulate one’s ideas in writing (as an essay), and (3) being able to argue one’s point (as a presenter or talk show/roundtable participant). Quality literary sources and philosophy best help develop such competences (arts other than literature could be added here).
The high schools of Ukraine nowadays are paying little attention to literature (it is included in the curriculum, but is mostly reduced to a mechanical transfer of elementary data). There is no philosophy; conversely, this discipline is taught in the French, German, Austrian, and Italian high schools and lyceums for two or three years (in some cases as an in-depth course). Young people at this age, when forming personalities, need a philosophy to help develop the said three competences, also to help better understand all the “existential” issues uppermost on the teenager’s mind. Philosophy helps develop the main skill of asking questions addressing oneself in the first place. One can only hope to see changes for the better.
The Ukrainian philosophic tradition is comparatively young. We don’t have enough translations from classic philosophers, just as we lack our own philosophic achievements. Yet this is not a shortcoming. On the contrary, this offers us a better chance of joining a worldwide intellectual process, adding a tangible contribution. I do hope that this contribution will be made soon, probably by some of this year’s high school graduates – or maybe by those entering school age.
