When children philosophise

Are children actually capable of forming serious philosophical thoughts? No, that was the doctrine for a long time. A child's brain was said to be cognitively too immature for serious thinking about thinking. However, not even philosophy remains untainted by the spirit of the times, and so so-called children's philosophy is in vogue today. There are children's philosophy conferences, courses and seminars where children and specialists tackle the really big questions together.

I can imagine that many parents are happy to take up this offer, because children's need for knowledge often makes us despair in its claim to totality. With Kant, however, we have to ask ourselves: What should I do in view of this wonderful new opportunity? Outsource philosophising with children to the specialist departments? Or accept that children's questions will drive me up against the walls of my own knowledge?
The truth is: philosophical questions are part of children's everyday lives. My son, for example, mused at the breakfast table when he was six, looking at a spoon, that it was actually the prison of cornflakes. Or he asked whether, in the battle of the good guys against the bad guys, the hero is analogous to the monster of the bad guys. And whether a hero is still a hero when he gets into trouble. Today, as a twelve-year-old, he tells me about his dreams about his other, dark self.

«Can we be sure that the whole world is not just a dream?»

My daughter was already digging into the foundations of human existence at the age of eight. She wanted to know how we are supposed to endure life when we know that we will die. At the time, I could have answered with Heidegger that existence is characterised by the fact that «its being is about this being itself». Which wouldn't have helped her, of course. So I told her that death was simply a part of life, that life gave no guarantees, but was still worth living. «Why?» she asked. That's exactly what it's all about: finding out your destiny. She then asked what fate was. The son knew again: «My destiny, for example, is that I keep hurting myself.» When we had got through that, the daughter suddenly stopped for lunch, chewing on a piece of rösti and bratwurst, and explained that she was no longer afraid, but she just couldn't explain why the world was the way it was. Fortunately, her five-year-old brother had an apt answer: «Well, I believe in the Big Bang.»
But she wanted to know more: «I just wonder how we can know all this. Can we be sure that the whole world isn't just a dream?»
Plato already wanted to know that. And Descartes. For the one it led to the allegory of the cave, for the other to radical doubt and the only certainty, namely that of thought. The American philosopher Hilary Putnam then turned the question into the matrix problem: How can we be sure that we are not just brains in a tank that only make us believe our world? His answer, rather simplified, was that if we were brains in a tank, we would lack the experiences with the outside world that make us ask ourselves such questions. And I told my daughter the same thing. That our philosophical problems make up our human existence, that we may not find definitive answers, but that our generic history consists of the fact that each generation stands on the shoulders of the previous one and can see further from there. This explanation, in turn, appealed to my son - from the monster aspect. A few years later, we actually watched the film.

To come to the conclusion: children's philosophical questions do not demand answers from experts, or even from the history of philosophy, but from their immediate living environment, from which they assemble the cognitive and emotional armoury for the conquest of their own lives. That's why I think institutionalised children's philosophy is a nice idea, but ultimately useless.
Tages-Anzeiger/Mamablog

About the author

Michèle Binswanger is a graduate philosopher, journalist and author. She writes on social issues, is the mother of two children and lives in Basel.