In March of last year, I was on a panel at the Philosophy of Education Society’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh. The panel was an author-meets-critics of the philosopher of education Eduardo Duarte’s new book, The Dialectic of a Philosophical Education. I wasn’t able to be there in person due to our baby getting sick, but my friend and colleague Tyson Lewis read out my pre-written remarks. I’m including them below for this week.

In my work I’ve struggled to articulate what philosophy of education offers school finance. I think Eduardo Duarte’s new book The Dialectic of a Philosophical Education has a set (both in the logical, set-theoretical sense and the musical sense, as in a DJ’s set) of concepts that helps with this task. So in my comments today, in the book and Eduardo’s honor, I’ve made a set list, or, better, a playlist, for applying Duarte’s dialectic of a philosophical education to school finance. I offer this playlist in the spirit of asking Duarte whether I’m picking up (in Augustine’s sense to pick up) what he’s putting down, so in what follows, I’ll describe four songs, each of which I think vibes with a Duartian concept, talk about the concept, and how it names the dialectic of a philosophical education for school finance. At the end I ask a critical question about the book and a risk I detected while reading it. (I made a playlist of the four songs on qobuz you all can listen to—if Duarte wants to play it on his show, by all means!)

The first song on my dialectic of a philosophical education for school finance playlist is “Circles,” a hit 90s single from the band Soul Coughing, with its brazen, focused, post-funk beat and Mike Doughty’s voice a gravely, confident, welcoming strangeness. According to Duarte, the dialectic of a philosophical of education will have us going in circles, requiring an ambling around, searching endlessly. There’s nothing linear here, and for school finance, it’s even more important to remember, as the numbers and culture and structure of the subject of schools and money will try to get you into line. To be philosophical about school finance, you have to take your first steps with a stronghearted, focused dialectic of walking in circles, answering Mike Doughty’s chorus (sung as though from the perspective of school finance), “I don’t need to walk around in circles,” with a “yes, you actually do”: looking at an audit, bond document, or budget, you have to go in circles.

The “Circles” beat settles into a static buzz-hum of the next song, the track “1/1” by Brian Eno off of Ambient 1/Music for Airports, a spacious, quiet, subtle, misty sound, because the next concept Duarte fashions is the calm nothingness of the phenomenology of reading where you sit with a book text (not a textbook) and everything fades away, it’s you and—in the case of school finance’s budget, bond, or audit—the numbers and flat-seeming language designed to push you away. Instead you sit with the school finance text, imbue it with the possibility of possibility, turning this text and yourself into something new. As Bay and Schnickus write, critical finance studies is a transformation of the self confronting finance and thus a transformation of finance. In the nothingness we bring with the phenomenology of reading, in this financial document, we can uncover a fecundity of political economy, and in the alone-space of the school finance text, the possibility for organizing around school money comes into focus. You turn yourself to the financial document to turn that document and its world, turning the world of finance towards the world of us. 

As we continue along the playlist, that fog of the possible in Eno heats up and burns off into the spacey but structured, and somewhat unbelievable jazz tuba of the Norwegian musician and composer Daniel Herksedal, a true poet of sound, from his latest album Movements of Air, specifically the Mediterranean-seeming song “Mountain of Companions.” Herksedal’s song is glosstorial in Duarte’s sense, glossing the jazz in the sense of a bright tonguey taking-away: you can hear Herksedal’s tongue on the tuba mouthpiece, the sound he makes is a familiar unfamiliar, a shining glossy breakthrough, the bright melody and rhythm like a market in Alexandria, Egypt where, Duarte tells us, writers used to gather and put down their thoughts in commentaries. The author’s tuba is abstract but in Duarte’s rendering of the concept of writing, abstraction is taking-away for clarification. After the fecund-cloud of solitary reading comes an abstract putting-together in textual commentary. In writing about school finance philosophically, we have to write in this glottal/glossy/glossatorial way, with our tongues, not dry financespeak, but loose and wet and clarifying. Sticking with the text, we break through (epoche) its lines of financial text, staying with but taking away (from) its world, ecstatically writing new words about school finance in connection with what we’ve read in anticipation of discussion with others. 

After reading and writing the philosophical student of school finance joins other people to talk, since, as Duarte cites Blanchot on Bataille, there is a principle of insufficiency at the heart of each being. Indeed, who the hell knows if what they’ve read and written about school finance makes sense, if it’s on the money so to speak. I’ve had the experience of only really understanding school finance when working with others on it. Thus the last song in our playlist is none other than CREAM (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) by the Wu-Tang Clan, experts of the swarm-group where each individual completes the incompleteness of others into a collective production par excellence. Raekwon raps in CREAM “figured out I went the wrong route/so I got with a sick ass click and went all out”: when we discuss, if we went the wrong way, or felt lost, when we discuss school finance philosophically we find our way with others to think together about school finance and how to transform it. 

The playlist ends. Reflecting on Duarte’s dialectic and the book expressing it, I notice a risk I’ll provisionally call methodological solipsism in the text. There’s a weak version and a strong version. In the weak sense, the themes of the book (listening, reading, writing, studying, discussion) have been taken up by other contemporary and past philosophers of education, some here on the panel, and yet the book doesn’t consult them. I wonder why. There’s something beyond just a “why didn’t you cite us” question here. 

In the stronger sense, Duarte opens the book by describing the circular structure of Haegedorn Hall, designed by architect Louis Jensen and built to be a government training center in the 1960s, first for the Treasury, then for the Bureau of Customs, then used as a federal courthouse, subsequently purchased by his university in 2003. He says the building’s odd circular structure makes him think of Socrates, because Socrates’s thinking goes in circles, though no discernable connection other than that givenness of Socratesness to Duarte inheres in the building. While rehabbing it, architects hired by the university said the building reminded them of something quite different, as one outlet reported: “The building's unorthodox circular layout provided many design challenges for TEK Architects' principal Charles Thanhauser: "Around the office we got to calling it The Death Star: It was laid out in such a way that you could circle around forever with no sense of orientation -pretty dismal." 

Is Haegedorn Hall about Socrates or the Death Star? For Duarte, it is about Socrates, and he didn’t look at how others may have seen it. Does the book and or its dialectic of a philosophical education have similar absences? This risk of methodological solipsism prevents casting a wider net and thus perhaps a more presencing account of the dialectic of a philosophical education, the risk is that the solipsism leaves certain fields of meaning unarticulated, and even violate the dialectic—of engagement, listening, studying, discussion— Duarte lays out.