ABSTRACT

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously stated that in philosophy, ‘What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect’ (1980: 17). There are recurrent scenes of interactions between teacher and student, and children and their elders, in his texts. Although they serve the purpose of setting up comparisons with actual language use, these comparisons do not necessarily provide the best examples of the emotional complexities in scenes of adult-child interactions. The extract shows an attempt to use children’s literature to complement Wittgenstein’s investigations by showing how the frustrations, dejections, and even the depressive sense of hopelessness that both student and teacher may experience is an inherent part of having a clear view of the dissonances that may occur in student-teacher and children-adult interactions. To explore the emotional aspects of such interactions, I turn to children’s literature, just as the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, who has engaged extensively in discussions about the relation between philosophy and literature, turns to romantic literature: ‘not for illustrations, but for allegories, experiments, conceptual investigations, a working out of this complex of issues, and I claim that that is what they are, that’s what produces these texts’ (Cavell, 1986: 229-230).1 Or as Cavell puts it later in the same text: ‘I want story-telling to be thinking…’ (1986: 238). The following extract is an example of how philosophical readings of children’s literature can be a form of philosophising that works with difficulties of the will.