the philosophical questioning of children

Abstract

This article is based on the Socratic philosophy of permanent dialogue in the pursuit of a knowledge that belongs to no one and does not offer full and definitive certainty. I discuss the possibility of understanding the category “childhood,” starting with the assumption that the fact of different socio-political contexts does not allow a univocal understanding of the category, and therefore obliges us to use the term “childhoods.” I begin with an anthropological approach assuming the unfinishedness of human beings as an ontological given, and thereby arrive at the same definition for adults and children: unfinished beings in a process of constant construction and reconstruction. I also argue that adults’ concept of childhood is a socially constructed one, and that the attempt to define childhoods and children must ascribe value to children as the social beings that they are, and not only as a possibility. Children have histories and they belong to a certain social class, which defines their relationships, distributes to them a social and cultural origin, determines their use of language, and confers value in accordance with the standards of their family context, as well as their own individual insertion in this context. Finally, I argue that questions are not born at random, but are produced by life itself. Philosophizing is a primordial experience for children as well as adults: it is produced as a dialectical emergence from the reading/interpretation/reaction process to the emerging phenomena of the relation between person and world. As such, the relationship between child and philosophy seems clear when we assume that both are driven by the curiosity that leads them to ask questions. Philosophy is born of the free and at times irreverent audacity of inquiring into the phenomena that we call world, and the most valuable knowledge is produced through this inquiry.