Abstract
This article examines the well from which learning, teaching, and research originate. It investigates how to perform these three aspects of academic practice well and to do it in a playful manner. Instead of repeating existing knowledge and scientific methods punctiliously, the playful academic experiences and presents knowledge in new or alternative ways. Playfulness more often results in discoveries and inventions that are otherwise unthinkable.Through an analysis of a selection of Plato’s myths, allegories, and imagery, the article demonstrates how very complicated subject matters can be illustrated in a playful, synecdochic form, hereby making the unfathomable easier to approach and understand.Examining Plato’s concept of ‘agalma’ – the beautiful ornament of wisdom – the article discusses how we can see academia as a jewellery box, or as a plaything. Agalma allows us to see learning, teaching, and research as an adventurous journey or as a playful labyrinth leading into all dimensions of being.
Highlights
Concepts and guidelines for reading the articleIt is tempting promptly to define play as openness and movement, freed from the restraints of rules
This article examines the well from which good learning, teaching, and research originate
Play is a symbol of the world, Eugen Fink states in The Oasis of Happiness he writes that ‘Being in its totality functions like play’ (1968, p. 29)
Summary
It is tempting promptly to define play as openness and movement, freed from the restraints of rules. We are told in Plato’s Laws, the gods play along ‘as companions in dancing: It is the device which enables them to be our chorus-leaders and stimulate us to movement, making us combine to sing and dance – and as this naturally ’charms’ us, they invented the word “chorus”’ (Plato, 1970, 654a2-6). It is ‘the mother and receptacle of all creation visible and sensible, [her-/itself] invisible and formless, all-receptive and partaking in the intelligible in a manner most puzzling and hard to grasp’ (Plato, 1929, 51a4-b2) This mother is the ever-existing region of all regions called khôra. Timaeus explains that Being, Becoming, and khôra existed prior to the creation of cosmos (Plato, 1925b, 52d3-4) They are three distinct things, but still necessary unified components of a spatio-temporal particular, as Allan Silverman In a few sections the article will cross this border of life and death
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