Philosophy Workshop: Are You What You Love?
August 9 @ 9:00 am – 11:00 am
What We’ll Explore
In the first few pages of Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche invites us to consider a particular way of knowing ourselves by asking us to look back over our lives and consider the question: “what have you truly loved up to now?”
“[Look] back on [your] life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator”)
In this workshop, we’ll undertake the personal task of this very reflection, following the structure that Nietzsche lays out for us. Based on these (private) reflections, we’ll then be invited to create drawings (A Ladder to a Bridge) that render abstractly those reflections. Afterward, we’ll have the opportunity to share and reflect on those, inquiring into one of the motivations behind Nietzche’s exercise: can we discern the fundamental law of our own true self? Finally, we’ll reflect on this way of knowing ourselves more broadly: To what extent are we what we love?
When
Saturday, August 9th from 9:00am-11:00am
Where
Pioneer Park (under the shade of the trees)
RSVP
Coming Soon…
Cost
FREE (Donations appreciated)
Other
Please bring something to write with. We’ll provide clipboards so you have a solid surface to work with.
Walk Leader
Mitchell Conway is a Community Philosopher at Merlin CCC, a branch facilitator/educator at Cottonwood ALC, and serves on the Academic Advisory Board & Questions? Journal for The Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization. A student of philosophy, a theater maker, and a teacher who cares ardently about empowering young learners, his work has often been an interweaving of education, story, and inquiry. At the BIRD Theatre in Tottori, Japan, among other productions, he collaborated with Korean group TUIDA to create The Poetry Class about the colonial period and Pacific war; he also directed students at Kei Ai High School in Romeo & Juliet. Using applied theater, he performed with Village Playback Theatre creating improvisations from audience members’ personal stories, and for a three-month residency he taught embodied methods of community dialogue through the Colombo Americano in Medellin, Colombia. He has also taught theater to elementary school students at 82nd St. Academics and middle school students at Summer Institute for the Gifted. For a year, Mitch taught at the English Immersion Program in Umphium Mai refugee camp on the Thailand-Myanmar border using a curriculum based in literature and critical thinking. With the New York Foundling at Queens College, he supervised the academic component of The Dorm Project, a program supporting youth in foster care through college. Mitch has a Bachelor’s degree in Theater from Skidmore College and a Master’s degree in Philosophy & Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Mitch has recently presented at the North Eastern Philosophy of Education Society (NEPES) and Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) conferences. He also relishes walking in the forest.
Make a Donation Here
Our philosophy activities are FREE to the community. While donations are never expected, they are always appreciated and help to keep programs like these going. Donations help to cover activity leader honorariums, implementation, and resource archiving, and more! If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution you can do so by clicking here. For those facing more challenging financial circumstances, we ask that you please try to “pay it forward” with acts of kindness for your neighbors and community.
