Stink, drink, bleed, burn and dance – none of these seem advisable when taking a philosophy exam. Just doing your best in silence – tongue between your lips, brain in a knot – is hard enough.
Yet a large part of the VWO exam in philosophy is based on the Self-destruction book (2019) by writer Marian Donner, which has the subtitle: Why we should stink, drink, bleed, burn and dance more. Exuberant life, wrote NRC about her book, is the recommended remedy for the “modern ills” (burnout, depression, anxiety) that neoliberalism has left us with.
The tone is set with the choice of passages from Donner’s book. They serve as a stepping stone for assignments such as: “Use the concepts of reason (logos), virtue (arete) and trading (energy) from what Aristotle means by self-realization.” Or: “Give two arguments that love as a theological virtue can offer an alternative to Donner’s skipping school as a resistance to the self-help industry.” Stand by it, like a repentant truant.
The opinion-oriented approach of the exam is therefore clear: pre-university students are expected to be able to form a reasoned opinion about deeper social issues. About self-development and the good life, about virtues and the free market, about the relationship between the individual and the community. All in the light of a communistic-tinged presentation with ‘the liberal ideological perspective’.
That should not come as a surprise. Served as compulsory subject matter for the philosophy course The good life & the free market by the philosophers Ad Verbrugge, Govert Buijs and Jelle van Baardewijk (affiliated with the Free University). They see “principled shortcomings” in modernity and advocate a renewed sense of community. In a frugal review in the book supplement of this newspaper, I called the book “a treatise that aims to prepare the minds for a fundamental rethink.” So it may be that I started this exam with a bit of a bias – although that should not be a problem among conservatives; According to them, prejudices are solidified experiences that give life direction.
To be fair, the student taking this exam will have a lot of work to do. But it is philosophy within an opinionated, culture-critical framework that not everyone will embrace. In addition to Donner’s ‘self-destruction’, the pre-university student is asked to conquer Mount Everest (personal meaning) and to consider postal delivery (excessive market forces). Under the supervision of heavyweights such as Aristotle, Heidegger and Nussbaum – who in the text are regarded as authorities and have to tolerate little contradiction – while that is also philosophy. In short, there will certainly be something to drink afterwards.
Above my then review of the textbook for this exam was the skeptical headline If this is neutral teaching material, I will eat my notebook. Promise is guilt, so I had a knife and fork ready as a precaution. Fortunately it is not necessary.