I've mentioned before an exercise I do with students sometimes, asking them to define "thing," and pressing them to avoid the word "thing" in the definition. This is more than a semantic rehearsal or an trap for inexact or circular thinking; for some it is actually their first foray into (explicit) ontology, and it's always fascinating to see which students move fastest towards defaulting to science ("a thing is a collection of matter..."), which to formalism ("a thing is whatever can be the subject of a sentence...") and so on. Most students pretty quickly see the point of avoiding circularity, but some are actually interested in it.
I have yet to encounter any student who digs in and defends circular reasoning per se, though some do try to get away with distinguishing between the words "anything" or "something" and plain old "thing." No one's yet persuaded me that this is viable. But the other day I did encounter a student who defended using a word in the word's definition. It wasn't the word "thing," however; it was the word "friend."
"I just don't know how to define 'friend,'" said one student. I was perhaps a little too pleased to see my students recapitulating the Lysis (backwards, no less), but I tried to stay out of the way as they went along. The conversation moved through various sub-issues and tangents (must you trust your friends? can you fight with your friends? How does friendship start? or end?) when suddenly another student exclaimed: "I think I know a definition of friendship! It's when two or more people say they are friends." Hmmm, I mused aloud. Can we use the word to define the word?
I genuinely try to cultivate an openness to being surprised in my class, but I admit I was expecting her to see a problem and move to modify her account. She did not; she doubled down. "Yes," she insisted; in this case, there was something important about including the word, something non-negotiable that she felt couldn't be done any other way. She was moving towards something like a formal necessity. It wasn't just that our pre-theoretical intuitions needed to be validated (though this was part of it); it was that you had to recognize the reality for it to be real. Friendship existed only in the enactment of it, and the enactment included the naming.
I know there are many teachers of "philosophy with children" for whom "staying out of the way" means essentially foregoing doing any philosophy themselves, but I'm not one of them. In any case, here was an instance when I really couldn't stop myself; the force of a thinker being true to her own insight was, like all integrity, powerfully attractive and brought out an answering enthusiasm. It was like hearing the ontological proof being carefully and gropingly thought out: I wanted to be sure I understood, but I also wanted to think along with her.
I see genuine philosophy happening in front of me all the time, in moments like these. It doesn't always sustain itself -- it takes work, and it's easy to slip into rote ways of thinking -- but it is possible. Which is why it takes friends.
