NYC Philosophy and Psychology Readers Community

Toward a Tactical Philosophy of Education: Post-Structural Anarchism and the Question of Power in the Classroom

Hi everyone!

My name is Ryland Frost, and I teach high school history in New York City. For the last eight years, I have been bringing my obsession with philosophy into my teaching practice and trying to contribute to philosophy of education from inside the classroom. This presentation takes up a book that has changed how I think about my work, and, I would argue, how anyone interested in power, agency, and human formation might think about theirs: Todd May’s The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism.

At the core of this talk is May’s post-structural conception of power as not merely suppressive but also productive: a force that not only destroys and oppresses individuals but also participates in creating them. Following May, I ask what happens when we stop treating power as something simply imposed from above and begin to see it as something that moves through our relationships, institutions, language, identity, and the ways we come to understand ourselves and one another.

Drawing May into conversation with John Dewey’s call to find out “what education really is,” I argue that philosophy of education must become tactical: it must begin from lived practice rather than from abstraction. To do so, this talk investigates how classrooms can become places where philosophical concepts are tested, revised, and made accountable to their effects.

Although my classroom is the “contact zone” from which I am philosophizing, beneath that educational tone lies a broader claim about public philosophy: our ideas should be tested at the local level, in the actual practices and relationships in which they take shape. This talk asks us to learn from experimentation and to see what our concepts become when they meet the world, or, in my case, the classroom. I look forward to sharing this work and to the dialogue that follows.

Jung, Gnosticism, Alchemy, and the Religious Function of the Psyche

I have been studying the depth psychology of Carl Gustav Jung since the 1980s. And since the publication of Jung's The Red Book (Liber Novus) in 2009, I have devoted particular attention to studying the relationship between Jung's psychology, Gnosticism, and Alchemy.
In this presentation, we will explore Jung's concept of the "religious function of the psyche"—the natural human tendency to seek meaning, wholeness, and experiences of the numinous through dreams, symbols, myths, and spiritual experience.

For Jung, this religious function is not limited to organized religion. It can also express itself through secular and everyday activities, including creative work, relationships, personal values, the search for purpose, and the symbolic meaning we find in ordinary life.

We will examine key Gnostic themes such as gnosis, Sophia, the divine spark, Anthropos, and the Pleroma, and how they influenced Jung's understanding of archetypes, the Self, and individuation.

We will also consider important alchemical symbols and processes, including the nigredo, albedo, rubedo, coniunctio, Mercurius, and the Philosopher's Stone, as expressions of psychological transformation.

Together, Gnosticism and Alchemy provided Jung with a "symbolic language for describing the lifelong process of individuation," the movement toward greater consciousness, integration of opposites, and realization of the Self.

Do monks spend their entire lives avoiding the world, or do the rest of us spend our entire lives avoiding the present moment?

Is religion a fairytale created by humans to avoid facing the bleak reality of existence, or is the quest for philosophical certainty an attempt to avoid facing life's inevitable uncertainty?

Do we live in a culture of “Peter Pans” who avoid work and responsibility, or of “workaholics” who avoid idleness and play?

After reading enough philosophy and psychology books you can start to wonder…

Is everything we do just one big avoidance strategy?!

In Part 1 we will explore the theme of avoidance — drawing from from thinkers such as...

• Rene Descartes
• Sigmund Freud
• Albert Camus
• Ernest Becker
• Bertrand Russell
• Alan Watts
• and more…

In Part 2 we will turn the microscope on ourselves—examining some of our own beliefs and behaviors through the lens of avoidance.

(30 min) Journal and discussion.

**bring paper and something to write with**
**Sharing is not required**