freedom, playfulness and worldhood

Reflecting on Being and Time is helping to clarify freedom and playfulness for me. A couple of quotes that represent what has helped me to understand are:

Every entity that is to 'to hand' has a different closeness, which is not to be ascertained by measuring distances. (p. 135)

The objective distances of Things present-at-hand do not coincide with the remoteness and closeness of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world. (p. 141)

The homogeneous space of Nature shows itself only when the entities we encounter are discovered in such a way that the worldly character of the ready-to-hand gets specifically deprived of its worldhood. (p. 147)

In the phenomenon of space the primary ontological character of the Being of entities within-the-world is not to be found, either as unique or as one among others. Still less does space constitute the phenomenon of the world. Unless we go back to the world, space cannot be percieved. (p. 148)

This brought into focus some insight into freedom and playfulness in our world.

Playfulness, whether it is a state of mind (Dewey, How We Think), a personality trait (see previous blog entry 'Evaluating Playfulness') or however I can concieve it, does not have a place within-the-world. Playfulness, whether shared or not, seems very much within our world and never 'ready-to-hand' and is appears always 'present-at-hand'.

Does that lead to the possibility of empowerment to anyone participating in playfulness?

Even in a world 'deprived of its worldhood' freedom (or lack of it) could be very visible. Physical freedoms, the freedom from others actions and the freedom to act would broadly seem to fit into this category. We could think if these as 'ready-to-hand', apparent or possible freedoms.

What of 'present-to-hand' freedoms - which may or may not be associated with 'ready-to-hand' ones?

There are lots of examples of individuals deprived of almost all of their 'ready-to-hand' freedoms and maintaining their 'presence-to-hand' freedom. eg. Wole Soyinka. Hopefully we can't find too many analogies with this circumstance to educational practice (although...).

I am particularly interested in why people feel a lack of freedom to learn in the process of their education. Note: the implicit assumption that everybody wants, needs and is learning - I'll have to tackle that later, but it is one of my assumptions.

I was listening to an interview with Dorothy Rowe about depression the other day that resonated with me along those lines.

Here are a couple of quotes:

So I was an outsider and then all sorts of incidental things happened, and also I was always questioning what we were being taught at school because it was a very rigid sort of syllabus that we had.

But of course the outsider sees things more clearly, when you're on the inside there's a lot you don't see. So I don't mind being an outsider.

....when you're depressed you're inside a prison. That's what depressed people talk about, being in that prison and you can't get out of it. You treat yourself horribly so that you're the prisoner in isolation and the cruel jailor.

Now when you speak of emotions, emotions are meanings, you know fear is the meaning 'something terrible is happening that is a threat to me'. Anxiety is the meaning 'something terrible is about to happen'. Anger is a wonderful emotion because it brings out our personal pride, anger is 'how dare this happen to me' and we fight back. Or we should, but nicely though.

You know the more you hate yourself the more frightened you are of other people. Because if they see how bad you are they will punish you. In that way you cut yourself off from every aspect of your life and that's the prison of depression.

But the pattern of thought that leads people to be depressed is so well practised, the steps in it, they don't have to think it consciously. Because first of all the only people who get depressed are good people.

So how do you get out of that prison? Oh I can tell you very easily, it's very simple for me to say but it's hard to do because you have to change ideas that go right back to when you were a very small child. And the first thing is that you come to realise that it isn't a matter of struggling to be good all the time, that, you know, you set yourself some reasonable standards, if you've got a job then you want to do a reasonable job, you don't have to do a perfect job.

The freedom to learn appears to have some parallels with freedom from depression and is possibly less 'within-the-world' than 'being-in-the-world'.