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Hermeneutic Pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation
1.Introduction - hermeneutics and critical pedagogy
Learning involves an essential incompleteness of knowledge, a noncoincidence
between teacher and student, a hermeneutical circularity that remains open. (Gallagher
1!"#$%.
&nowledge and ignorance are friends. 'he interpretation of what we have known
realies the promise of learning that knowledge carries within it. )e are all interpreters of
everyday life. *o world is forever closed to us, and none appears to us fully embodied.
+ermeneutics is the art and theory of interpretation, and thus its language is that of the
landscape of learning. 'hat arcadian egos must travel such terrain in search of their
destinies, and that death too inhabits every rcadia, only reinforces the dual limits that
mortality has conferred upon us from the beginning. ne the one hand, we are made
unmade, and must finish ourselves. n the other hand, we can never accomplish this final
form, whatever we may imagine lies ahead for us. 'eaching and learning are
simultaneously acts of interpretation and willing action which affirms not only our
present eistence but also our future, however unknown. *o one is truly master of these
processes, but all must partake in them as if they are at least competent enough to begin
again. 'he tyche of mastery is the wisdom that sees living on as a work in progress, and
the knowledge that such work cannot come to an end and yet also must nevertheless end.
'he practical wisdom that is generated from the combination of the techne of skills and
knowledge and the eperience of the unepected and different enables the tyche of
mastery to attain phronesis, its true character. /ustom provides the original template of
human diversity and society, while the practice of theory etends, overturns, and modifies
what has been the case., what is customarily so. 0rimary socialiation provides the action
of hexis, or what is taken for granted as the case, tradition, an norms. Praxischallenges
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the status uo by opening the previously singular and insular world into its manifold and
strange recesses. 'he world as it is confronts us and its alien uality makes further
customary action impossible. 2et it is only a combination of the two of these, what has
been the case and what is strange, that can create the hermeneutic environment of
phronesis, the practical wisdom of living on. /ustoms are reinterpreted, theory ad3usted
to suit reality, the social reality of tradition is reshaped, and the episteme of the serious
business of constructing knowledge takes on new its historical task. 'he wisdom of
eperiential practice and reflective self-consciousness is phronetic in its character. It
neither brooks the somnolence of our present state nor does it presume upon the authority
of the sciences. It accepts neither value nor fact alone. rather, it presents to us the idea of
validity, a temporary ethical stature that confers authority only on the case to case. )hile
custom presents a ready-made reality for our consumption and oblation, and theory
presents to us the revolution of consciousness that overturns that world, practical wisdom
shines upon the light of worldliness, the way in which the world worlds itself, and it is
this kind of eperience that marks the most realistic of human perceptions, for we know
that what we think is sub3ect to change, and what we do is no final will.
ll of this points directly to an ontological characteriation of self-understanding.
'his 4self4 is, however, not merely something that is ranged over against either other
selves or the world, but it inhabits and coeists with these others and with their worlds, as
well as )orld itself. )orld is at once the home of beings as it is the envelope of 5eing.
)ithin this envelopment, we hardly notice that we too are part of the fabric of history and
world. 'he world as it is also contains the world as it must be, but this 4must4, the shalt of
the worlding of world, is also no final will, and its historical foundation is revealed to us
!
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when we alter our surroundings, even in the slightest degree. )hether we learn to use a
new tool, or a broken tool anew, or for an unepected purpose, means that we must
replace our prior epectations of both our skill set and the tools around us - both part of
the 4stock of knowledge at hand4 that is a further envelopment into which we are
sometimes too sealed - and thus what comes to be the new is always a herald of history
itself. +istory is such that it changes over time. It does not matter that sometimes, or
perhaps betimes, the pace is almost unnoticeable. 'he pace of history is akin in this way
to the presence of the world" 6)orld is something sensed 4alongside4 the entities that
appear in the world, yet understanding must be through world. It is fundamental to all
understanding7 world and understanding are inseparable parts of the ontological
constitution of Dasein's eisting.6 (0almer 18"199 italics the tet4s%. 5oth time and
being in their capital states are like social facts, yet they are more universal than the
cultural a prioris that populate the list of primary socialiation form any specific or
singular society. 'hey do not lay down the normative content by which each culture is
content to live. :ather, they are the ether that fills the vessel of our common humanity,
and like this invisible and at times even mythical atmosphere, such characters of the
human condition can become soporifics. If we are not to wander the earth as
somnambulistic masses, we must always turn our attentiveness, our concernfulness of
being, towards both history and world, for what they are we are as well.
In a uniue manual, the inter-war artist 0aul &lee makes much of the then
fashionable claim that civil society in its mass acculturation has both dimmed and denied
the alertness that human being needs to attend to become both historically conscious and
worldly at once. +e draws these social facts as vectors, their force brought thus into high
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relief, and he suggests that 6'he contrast between man4s ideological capacity to move at
random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is the
origin of all human tragedy.6 (&lee 1;9";9 reud would famously label us 3ust five years later"6 It is this contrast between power
and prostration that implies the duality of human eistence. +alf-winged--half-
imprisoned, this is man?6 (ibid%. 'he ecce homoof our general condition is always well
taken, as it provides the beginning of all beginnings. )e must start always with what we
are, which also includes all we have ever been. 'hus time and world merge, as it is the
presence of the present world as it is in our lives as they are, and the history of all that has
led up to the making of what we are 3ust now that collide, and perhaps collude, in the
subtlety of metonymic beings. It is reflection that opens up these secrets, so that they
cannot continue to be passedsotto voce, avoiding the light of the world and the lighted
space of the envelope of 5eing" 6'hought is the mediary between earth and world.6 2et
action must be the result of thought, lest it lend only a further and deeper credence of the
fact that we cannot, as conscious mortals, connect the end with the beginning" 6'he
broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man4s tragic limitation. 'o be
impelled toward motion and not be the motor? ction bears this out.6 (ibid%. 'his
4sketching4 of an eistential pedagogy remarks upon our culture as a mere subsistence,
suggests &lee. It is an etension, certainly, and we are given to the farthest flights of
earthbound fancy, which today is not even bound to the earth. 5ut the difference between
earth and world lies precisely here" we do not always have an earth, as we can either
destroy it, or seek to leave it altogether. 5ut we must always be within )orld, for we are
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beings not only in the world, but of )orld, and its is the history of the worlding of world
that makes us historical beings as well as eistential ones.
It is easy to forfeit this gift, to eschew this task. 'he fallen-ness of human being
should not be immediately read as only a theological drift. :ather, and more importantly
in an age where the prevalence of mass culture - and indeed, the educational institution as
such is both a scion of and a valet for such a culture - is also like an envelope for us. )e
are surrounded by it in a manner that makes it look much like world. It is so much a part
of the world as it is that it may be mistaken for it, and in fact this i s perhaps its chief
goal. Inasmuch as :icoeur reminds us that the 4evil of evil4 involves a process of
4fraudulency in the work of totaliation4, mass culture, more so than the church or yet
even the state which provide him with his eamples, is the more perfected foil for the
vehicle of verfallen. )e lose ourselves not in the other nor ethically for the other, as in
Levinas, nor do we lose ourselves in self-introspection that some religious disciplines
demand of us on the way back to an original state of union, but rather in the swirl of what
is only of the moment, fashion, image, other-directedness and commodity. 'hus the
theological link between a self-interpretation which must take account of this tendency
for dasein to immolate itself on the pillar of casual desire and the eegesis of a state of
being which is allegoried after the advent of agrarianism as a 4fall4 from grace, an
absence of community and a turning away from the problem of eistence, the problem of
a fragile and mortal consciousness that can yet think itself anew in the face of death,
become more clear" 6*evertheless, the notion of @asein is constituted as a possible,
perhaps Aisyphean counter-instance against this fall from oneself7 and the reflective
unfolding or elucidating interpretation of our hermeneutical situation is the means
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through which we can become aware of ourselves...6 (Grondin 1;";9%. It is +eidegger
who has shown that the danger of 4ruination4 occurs through the avoidance of the
encounter between a self which is already in the world and as worldly as has been its own
history and participation in )orld and the self-understanding becoming ontological in
the face of its own demise. If we separate self and world we are doomed to remaining
fallen, as we have ecerpted ourselves - falsely, and with a suspension of disbelief in the
social forces arranged so that we imagine our landings to always be of the softest nature,
as if we are coming home to an eden after merely a brief hiatus - from the envelope of
5eing which holds our dasein in its utmost possibility of mitsein. )orld, rather, is an
already always fact of this eistence, not to be encountered as one might an other, or an
ob3ect within the world. 2et world remains occluded to the lens which attempts to
4analye4 it without so much as a drop of human blood. )e cannot 4enter4 into something
from which we have not ever been apart, states +eidegger" 6nd did he not perceive, at
the heart of every state-of-mind, the blatant fact of the impossibility of getting out of a
condition which no one has ever entered, inasmuch as birth itself < = has never, properly
speaking, been the eperience of entering into the world but that of already having been
born and finding oneself already thereB6 (:icoeur 1!"9!#%. 'his is also why it is only
allegorical to speak of a fall of origin, or a cosmogonical collapse, whereas it is
reasonable to characterie the lapsing of alert and concernful being in the world as a kind
of torpor laden centrifugality, pulling one into the center of mere things. 'his 4verfallen4 is
6..but the facticity on the basis of which @asein becomes a burden for itself...6 and not
something that suggests 6...any fall from some higher place, in the gnostic manner...6
(ibid%. Indeed, our eperience of early growth and maturation is uite the opposite of the
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myths. )e become something more from something less, as in the acuisition of
language, motor skills, social norms and desires and what have you. ur beginnings are
lower than our aspirations and accomplishments, and if, in the end, we cannot return to
the beginning, we can depart the blessed life as *ietsche states we must, and, as he
mentions, we find 3ust such a departure in another mythic narrative, that of dysseus and
/alypso.
'he process by which we attain the higher forms of humanity is that of learning
and thence understanding. 'he prior pre3udice of the world as it has been is overturned by
hermeneutic eperience. 'hat old assumptions are replaced by current sets is no a fatal
problem, but constitutes rather and ongoing and necessary challenge. It is well thought of
as a kind of 4tension4 between what I have been and what I must become. 'his 4must-ness4
of living on - not merely in the face of death, which is mostly abstract in its possible
subito until we approach such a shrouded horion in a more knowing fashion if we attain
old age - is held within the eperience which is ironically felt most stringently when it
must take account of its own absence. 'hat is, our eperiences are never uite enough to
live on with, we cannot be complacent based only on what we have come to know as our
own. 'he hermeneutics of learning in al contets betrays this tension. 'he gift if prior
eperience wears thin, much as well-worn clothing must be cast off as eventual dross, no
matter the warmth and status it may have given us when we first received it. +ence,
60rimarily, what is produced in educational eperience, in the tension between the
familiar and the unfamiliar, or between student and teacher, is understanding which is
self-understanding. 'o say the same thing another way, learning involves the production
of one4s own possibilities.6 (Gallagher 1!"1$9%. 'here is no real mystery to this
#
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process. ne simply, and regularly, encounters situations both human and apparently
cosmic, where we do not know what is going on, or how to act, or what to think of reality
in terms of whether it has remained reasonable or has taken off into the fanciful. ne
would suggest that this is normative for human beings of all kinds, though the more
insular the cultural contet the less eperience one might correspondingly be able to rely
on to get by. nd it is through language and literacy that learning takes place. *ot all of
these languages are 4natural4 or spoken, orthographically rendered or sporting
leicographies and dictionaries, but at base, one could also suggest that all learning
involves a new literacy, a new level of the ability to the read )orld. Auch a world, both as
a universal eistential envelope and the purely humanistic world of social reality, the
world 4as-it-is4, reuires skill in many different languages, and for all we know, this might
even include the tongues of the dead. 2et because literacy of the world is our common
task and gift, history is a willing ally. /oming to know it, however, is sometimes not
enough, but neither here is history coy or aloof, it is we, rather who are not taking task
seriously enough while pronouncing the gift of history to be already our own"
:ather than resigning ourselves to either its parado or mystery, we are trying to
be more faithful to the normal experience of language, to its phenomenological
appearance in our minds. In so doing we also aim to be more respectful of the sense that
we are never alone when using language, that we are necessarily bound up with others atall linguistic moments, and that there are ethical and political forces which go to the heart
of language use. (5leich 1CC"8;, italics the tet4s%.
'he limitations on literacy are such that it is easy to imagine that language itself,
or history, for that matter, reaches not into our consciousness and that we must step
outside of ourselves in all ways to take what is necessary for our collective survival. 'his
is only half correct. 2es, we reach outside of ourselves in coming to terms with the new
and unepected, whether the news comes from the past or the present. Auch eperiences
C
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cuts into the heart of what we thought was true, and reorders our epectations, both of
ourselves and of others. 5ut it is not correct to say that history is nothing but eternal to
our lives, since it has already passed into a past. *ot at all. )e rather carry it around with
us, not only as memory but as the fully waking alertness of being in the world. )e could
not, in other words, function as human beings without a direct cogniance of what we
have been, and what we have already learned about ourselves and )orld. 'hat there is an
art to this endeavor perhaps goes without saying, but learning per se is not necessarily an
aesthetic act" s @ewey (19$"9$#% suggest, 6It is by way of communication that art
becomes the incomparable organ of instruction, but the way is so remote from what is
usually associated with the idea of education...6 that we often seem to feel more
comfortable pretending that literacy is merely a technical matter. /ompetency should be
our only goal, with the 4one best way4 as our holy path. 2et immediately we are
confronted with the human fact that to be able to do something well includes all of the
non-technical parameters of social and intellectual life. Ideas have a genealogy, writing
has an aesthetic, speaking has an elouence which not mere shill, and desire is both
adorable but also risky, and indeed, such risk makes what is attractive to us all the more
desirable. )e cannot then speak of 4competency4 as if it were a measurable end of a
known uality or category. Instead, interaction within social reality reminds us that the
otherness of both massive world and individuated human diversity that learning is more a
conversation than a tool" 6If language is thought of as 4dialogue4, for eample, then
competence would have to include a category like 4ability to interact with another person4,
while performance would have to include much more than linguistic data.6 (5leich
1CC"8$%. :eductions of all kinds are often a kind of knee-3erk reaction to the aniety
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regarding any task. /an I rationalie this problem into its component partsB we may ask
of ourselves. )hat is the simplest solution to what I am facingB /an I avoid the regress of
the second guess and the shadow of self-doubtB 'he premature burial of the issue of
understanding as self-understanding is the root of not only misunderstanding but also of
the fetish of techniue as a way of grace.
Dnderstanding is thus the very essence of one4s reason of being. )hether or not
we are placed on earth in a manner beyond human imagination, whether we are more
than the insignificant significance of the local sentience of the cosmos, our collective
enterprise involves us in the most immediate manner within the envelope that is being4s
self-understanding. nce again, akin to and kindred with )orld and its subtle
omnipresence, the absence of an omniscience which would be both the foil and
counterweight to )orld imbues human life with its most essential tension. +eis helps us
to imagine that we do have this kind of utter and immanent knowledge of our world. )e
are assured, by learning our primary socialiation well, that we are in control. 2et we
come to know through growth and diverse eperience that this is not necessarily the case,
and indeed, it must necessarily not be the case given the diversity of human culture and
individuality. 0rais elevates the stakes of self-control and attempts to provide us with a
new arsenal of systems and techniues, theories and rubrics by which we can gain control
over both others to self and the world at large. Like heis, prais too when seen only in
this way is an illusion, and one that fosters powerful delusions, 3ust as does the thrall of
custom. 0rais is better defined within the character of its first encounter with what has
been the case, as revolutionary thinking and learning. *o study of the arts of the human is
bereft of it, but at the same time, prais institutionalied eerts a territoriality that
1E
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becomes threatening to itself. If knowledge is seamless, then discourse manifestly is not.
)e are thrust into a contet where at first we felt the liberation of perspective and
reflection, only to come to know rather abruptly the limits of discursive canons and the
black bo of unuestioned principles, both in the sciences and the humanities. Fust
because we are now euipped with the techniues of 4good thinking4, those very tools by
which the customary and the traditional have come to be uestioned and thence
overthrown,
...does not mean that scholars in the humanities and social sciences do not have
the task of using their powers to develop a consciousness of their own situation, the
situation in which they stand over against the tradition that they are trying to understand.
uite the contrary? In every genuine effort at research one needs to work out aconsciousness of one4s hermeneutical situation. nly in this way can one shed light on the
basis of one4s interests in it and on what supports one4s standpoint of uestioning. nd of
course one still must confess to the endlessness of this task. (Gadamer !EE1"$8%.
0rais as only an effort to support the current situation of its own hegemony is not
authentic prais at all. 'he theories of knowledge that cast doubt not merely upon the
accuracy and precision of instrumental knowing but as well, and far more importantly,
uestion radically the entire enterprise of science and philosophy in the contet of their
own genealogies, the history of their respective geneses and their intimacies with one
another, as well, and of the utmost, their place in the politics of our own times, it is these
kinds of theoretical efforts that deserve most our praise and support. 'he study of
knowledge as both a human enterprise as well as an historical and ethical task is
immediately and already an hermeneutic task. 'hrough this, custom re-renters the arena.
In this encounter, practical theory must come to grips with the world as it is, as it is this
world that not only occludes the common eistential envelope of )orld - through the
advent and promulgation of both cultural diversity andglobal culture - but it is also the
world from which all scholarship ultimately originates, and by which it must be tested. if
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such an encounter is sincere and authentic to the human interest, and not a town and
gown affair where there is a competitive prie or an accounting of calculatedly scarce
resources, then we find ourselves on the road to phronesis. 'his practical wisdom of
eperience and reflection combined is the ideal that a critical hermeneutics of education
seeks. It is not an end in itself, however, but another more educated and mature means to
move on with the 4endlessness of the task4.
'hat prais often stops well short of coming to terms with heis as the vast
ma3ority of human thinking in both the tradition and in the world at large is one thing.
5ut that it seeks to insulate itself against the world only further fosters the cloak of
cultured invisibility that shields us from our eistential condition, and masks )orld as a
philosophical artifice aberrant from and abhorrent to instrumental rationality. 'he teacher
or professor is thus cast as an agent for a fashionable rationale of why the world works in
this way and not others, or worse, why it must work only in this way, as it may be the
best way. 'hat transmissive pedagogy has an authoritarian character, no matter how
frosted with 4student-centered4 activities or resisted officially by student course
evaluations - one of the chief divide and conuer tools of a suspicious and always
threatened management - disallows both the inventiveness of critical theory and the
spontaneity of reflective thought. +istorical consciousness is something that is not even
disavowed. :ather it is not sought at all. *o authentic critiue is mounted, and it is mere
criticism that we listen to both from our own students and from the public at large"
6'hose pupils re3oice who perceive in the teacher that against which they instinctively
feel the entire painful process of education is waged. 'his indeed comprises a critiue of
the educational process itself, which in our culture to this day has generally failed.6
1!
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(dorno 1C"1C;%. Dltimately, the pressure to perform in a measurable manner
outspeaks even the efforts to maintain competitive grade point averages, for once
graduated, students find 3obs not based on any lasting relationship with what their
transcripts supposedly represent. 'hey know how to do something, and this something is
a unit of instrumental rationality and has as its vehicle of desire the polished techniue of
motor-skilled manipulator. *ot that there is fault here at any individual level. )e can only
blame ourselves for en3oying the patent but often fraudulent luuries of our mass society
too much, for becoming numbly comfortable with all that is apparently given to us with
so little effort. 'he perennial ritual of the sacrifice forgotten, spring turns to summer and
for a time, all is warmed by the light of this brave new world.
5ourdieu and 0asseron famously accuse us of abetting a non-culture to this regard
when it comes to sub3ecting the institution of education to a serious critiue. 'he ends in
mind that are supposed to emanate from such a study are presumably the ends of a
general human freedom. 2et the purpose of all human learning up until very recently has
been merely to survive and reproduce. *ot in any @arwinian sense, but rather so that the
variety of cultural templates might be transmitted to successive generations over perhaps
millions of years. ver the previous uarter millennium, however, a new goal has arisen
that has transformed the human self-imagination. 'his is the goal of an abstract freedom
that has in its own envelope human happiness. before, even with the Greeks, happiness
may be thought of as freedom from care or suffering. 'oday, perhaps, we may better think
of it as having something to do with enlightenment. In fact, happiness might well be the
very opposite of what it once as. >reedom from concern with oneself and with others is a
kind of blissful ignorance. In spite of the Aocratic in3unction that reminds us that the
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4uneamined life is not worth living4 for a human being, we do not get the sense that such
a self-eamination is necessarily endless in its scope. if the cosmos itself is bounded, then
human nature too must have its limits. If there are forces eternal to those of our own
making, fates which predetermine our actions and motives, then we cannot aspire to a
truly free state of consciousness with a view that such an ideal can in fact be achieved.
ll of this is straightforward, but recently we have begin to imagine a cosmos without
limits, an etension of consciousness neither divine nor human, an anonymous stage for
the newly liberated concept of human freedom to be played out in as vast a scale as we
can manage. 'his is ualitatively different from what our ancestors imagined was the
case. 'his liberating uality also has its risks, as when children leave the family hearth for
the first time. ne cannot do so in blithe ignorance of all that prais will suddenly invite
one to partake in. the hearth of heis does not prepare us in any way for freedom, either
abstract or material and logistical. 'hese latter freedoms, which our society is so well-
designed to confer upon those who ironically are the least free from social norms - the
most conforming of our children attain the highest honors in capitalist education, for
eample - distract us from the goals of the enlightenment, and through this lens, the
ideals we imagine at least a few of the ancient thinkers also to have been espousing. 'he
pro3ect of freedom is now a general task of the entire species, as, and also for the first
time, all of our lives are threatened with etinction at a moment4s notice through the
concurrent advent of modern technology" 6'o refuse such a pro3ect is to consign oneself
to blind or complicitous adherence to the given as it gives itself, whether this theoretical
surrender be masked under the flaunted rigour of empirical procedures or legitimated by
invocation of the ideal of 4ethical neutrality4, a mere non-aggression pact with the
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instrumental rationality. 'he 4bo4 that we are being disingenuously ehorted to 4think
outside of4 is much larger than managerial attitudes imagine, or desire to imagine. Instead,
we can while away our intellects in the salons of what we already know to be the case,
whilst all the while also imagining that we as the intellectual elite already know 4what is
to be done4, and indeed, are also, as we speak, doing it" 6t least part of the reason the
argument can go on for so long is that conservative academic interests are usually
enhanced by such debates, while the participants feel no need to arrive at some practical
result or program. 'he lack of concrete purpose diminishes the value of the debates by
keeping them 4academic4.6 (5leich 1CC"119-$%. It would seem that the last place that
could afford the hermeneutics of suspicion would be the educational institution in all of
its forms and levels, as it is the structure that has been ordained with the task of
reproduction of what has been the case, in economics, politics, and sociality.
'his 4suspicion4, that all is not what it seems to be, raises its nascent uestioning in
adolescence. 'he 4whyB4 uestions of the child are much more empirical in their character,
and may be taken uite literally as ueries about the nature of things as we humans know
such to be in our own time. 'he key difference that animates the more provocative
uestions of later childhood is their incipient criticism of the apparent way of the world.
*o longer are we content to hear an eplanation from a voice of authority. If the response
is not to our liking we do not merely react, but uestion further, and we change the tenor
and direction of our uestions to get at the root of the matter, rather than the obstreperous
child who merely repeats himself in the hopes of wearing down his parent. 'he uestions
of adolescence and beyond are the unschooled demands of an interrogation into the world
as it has been presented to us, with the aspiration of not only attaining knowledge of the
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world as it is, and specifically the social world, but also of changing it so that it benefits
us more directly. In this way, one might allegorie +eraclitus is the 4father4 of all
teenagers, Aocrates the practiced wit of the 4annoying kid4 in class, and Har the radical
who leaves his parental home in search of a wider destiny. 2et for our own time no more
so than did *ietsche alter both the tack and the interests of understanding and historical
consciousness" 6'he 4will to power4 changes completely the idea of interpretation7 it is no
longer the manifest meaning of a statement of a tet, but the tet4s and its interpreter4s
function in the preservation of life. 'he etension of power - that is the real meaning of
our all-too-human insights and cognitions.6 (Gadamer 1C$";C%. Left only thee, we are
too easily reminded of the adolescent striving for some self-determination in her life, and
we are left without the deeper notion of an etension of self-understanding. 2et 6'his
radical position forces us to attend to the dichotomy of the belief in the integrity of tets
and the intelligibility of their meaning, and the opposed effort to unmask the pretensions
hidden behind so-called ob3ectivity.6 (ibid%. 'he sudden realiation that what has been the
meaning of something, anything, has been placed before us so that other meanings can
maintain their latent functions - convenience politically or familialy or institutionally, for
eample - strikes us as a truth beyond the whitewash. )e may become fatalistic or
cynical at such news, depending its contet and what we had hoped to gain from
discovering what 4lay behind4 the pretense. Ideally, however, we over time develop a
practiced eperience that knows how and who to uestion. 'his phroneticdisposition,
skeptical but not cynical, realistic without being pessimistic, discontent without being
nihilistic, is not so much the mark of estranged youth as it is the beginning of effective
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historical consciousness and the reflective mind necessary for the eamined life to take
place over its fullest course.
*ietsche himself begins this course of reflection long before he discusses the
will to power. Apeaking of the new consciousness of both eternal history of cultures and
the history of one4s own predilections and biases, as well as the pedigree of institutional
and moral authority in the world, states at the outset that we must have this kind of
breadth - the never-mastered tyche that transcends all of the stocks of knowledge at hand
available in the study of history and society as only a functioning state, or yet a working
model - in order to live humanely" 6)e need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and
action, let alone for the purpose of etenuating the self-seeking life and the base of
cowardly action. )e want to serve history only to the etent that history serves life...6
(*ietsche 1C9";
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ob3ectivity can remind one of nothing other than the parental response to an uncountable
number of youthful ueries - 4because that is the way it is4. 2et we come to know that as
we grow older, the world changes around us. dults are capable of more decisions than
are adolescence, and we are burdened with more responsibilities as the corollary to this
new freedom. 'he idea of freely making one4s life in the world of others is a too easy
egress - a :andian thought eperiment, perhaps - as against both the interlocution and the
simple resistance that all ethical beings must offer to one another in the face of attempts
at pure willful domination. It is the learning of these limits that is perhaps yet more
4painful4 than even the knowledge of their ill effects within culture and society.
2et we generally cannot learn of such limits and implications thereof within either
the spaces of heis of prais. )e must rather learn it in the space of the world as it is,
where our consciousness thereof is not divorced from either its worldly envelope - the
social reality of the entirety of our history and history in general - or the larger and pan-
cultural )orld of human eistence and condition. 'he eperiential learning that generates
phronesis is the process by which such a consciousness may be pursued and acted upon7
6ducation as the practice of freedom - as opposed to education as the practice of
domination - denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the
world7 it also denies that the world eists as a reality apart from men.6 (>riere 1#E"8%.
5ecause we must act within the world, and because we know that we cannot act within
any world without that self-same world being changed, as well as reacting upon ourselves
and changing us as part of its process of worlding, the education of practical eperience
which is not limited by to techniue always a transformative learning. It is this ongoing
transformation that reminds us of the sincerity of being when it is forced to think itself
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anew" 6uthentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men,
but men in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are
simultaneous" consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.6 (ibid%. 'he
envelope of singular )orld is embodied in each individual human being in the world of
forms. 2et these social facts - institutions, morals, rules, and rates of various kinds -
reflect only the attempt to frame a world as it passes along. Like an identity or a role, our
understanding of )orld is aided by the frameworks we construct to hold it in place for a
time. Hutable history is too liuid a composition for the rule of natural law, pure reason,
or 4best practices4 policy and management. 'herefore time itself must be made to slow
until any perceptible change can be controlled ahead of itself. 'his notion that we can
prepare is based on prior eperience, though we are also all too aware that we cannot
predict with any ultimate precision what net will occur, either to ourselves or to the
world around us. @iversity and perspective are the keys to the most authentic engagement
with the world as it is, because we know that what is implicit in this phrase is its pro
temporeuality. 'he world is as it is for now. 'his is its 4natural4 state, if you will, though
it be not a state of nature apart from humanity, as >riere reminds us. +ence phronetic
education arms itself not only with the dialectic of authentic prais, but also the self-
doubt of autohagiography" 6It will therefore always argue a still defective education if the
moral character can assert itself only through the sacrifice of what is natural7 and a
political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to produce unity only by
suppressing variety.6 (Achiller 18;"9!
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work of totaliation. )e know that such a work emanating from these sources is
fraudulent, and thus the 4evil of evil4 in the face of authentic sources of universal 5eing,
)orld and Apirit, wherever these may be located in the modern mind, and therefore 6'he
Atate should respect not merely the ob3ective and generic, but also the sub3ective and
specific character of its individuals, and in etending the invisible realm of morals, it
must not depopulate the realm of phenomena.6 (ibid%. t the same time, any collection of
nation-states which eist to preserve all that divides humanity from itself cannot
ultimately be trusted with such a task as authentic education. 4Atate /urricula4 is indeed an
appropriate phrase with which to designate a kind of banking education that indoctrinates
persons on their way to becoming the good citien. Like centralied social institutions
before it, the modern state attempt to gather in its centrifuge a monopoly of ideas, even
ways of being in the world. 'he more fascistic these attempts, the less likely they are to
be successful over the ling term. *o state has been around for a long enough time to
prove itself in any tested sense. rguably the oldest of modern nations, the 5ritain that
begins in 18CC has itself lasted only during the corresponding epoch of capital. It is
highly likely that when economic forces shift, the current way of doing politics will
collapse. 'his is indeed what all recent revolutionary thinkers have adapted as a
presuppositions. +owever likely this may be, however, one cannot take it as a given. It is
possible the state will outlast its siblings of market and rational utility, bureaucracy and
civil religion. >uture oriented prais has this deficit" )hile it has a vision of what the
world 4should4 rather be it can often trip up at its historical feet. )hat is underfoot at
present is precisely the world as it is, and not some visionary value. :ational action
directed at finite goals is one of the best tools available to the human lot. bsolute values,
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however rational, risk overstepping the needs of the day, as one wishes for the philosophy
without the sustenance of the full stomach. Instead, we need to engage the present as the
birthstone of the future" 6)e always live at the time we live and not at some other time,
and only by etracting at each present time the full meaning of each present eperience
are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. 'his is the only preparation which
in the long run amounts to anything.6 (@ewey 19C"$%.
If such a process is most fully characteried by the hermeneutical circle of heis,
prais and phronesis, let us briefly outline the salient motifs of each of these respectively,
with a view to introducing the materials of the three substantive sections which follow
below. 'here are at least seven characteristics associated with each of these phases of the
hermeneutical circle within any pedagogic contet. +eis, as what is customary, is
associated with cultural belief in all of its forms. s a form of knowledge, heis is learned
simply by growing up in this or that society. % +eis,
1. originates in socialiation!. is diverse cross-culturally and yet claims truth
9. provides a comfort one of 4the known4$. demarcates social in-groups
;. can become ideology through institutions8. is unreflective and semi-conscious
#. often includes a transcendental realm
0oint ; is generally the most dangerous thing about heis, and of course this is
not a process by which heis alone can come to grief. *ations of al kinds notoriously
play on their citiens4 beliefs in order to make war, set internal policies, 3ustify current
economic or ta systems and the like. )hat is customary, 3ustified by 4what has been the
case4 or the traditional response of 4this is how we do things4, or how are ancestors 4have
always done4 things is easy to understand once one has become part of the culture in
uestion. 'he amalgam of origins and effects that inhabit heis correspond to what
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Acheler identified as the 4natural attitude4. @oing what comes 4naturally 4 for humans is of
course not a part of nature, as we have been divorced from such a symbiosis for some
millions of years evolutionarily speaking, but what Acheler and later Achut meant by
such a nomenclature was simply that the 4second nature4 of socialiation - really, a first
nature for human beings - allows us to function in a set of historical contets within
which we have been acculturated. /orrespondingly, point ! reminds us that once
outside of these specific contets we are often lost, as when we travel and cannot
recognie the norms elsewhere, even in an increasingly globalied world culture. ven
within 4our own4 culture we know that there are plenty of particualr circumstances where
we do not know what is eactly going on. Generally, however, we can learn these other
contets through involving ourselv$s with people and activities that are befitting to them.
'hat we are most in love with points 9 and $ above speaks not merely to our bigotries
as effects of thorough socialiation mied with ideology - witness the miniscule marriage
rates between people of different social classes, for instance - but also to the overall
success rate of the process of heis as a social fact. 'hat we do not reflect on this kind of
knowledge, that of belief and custom, only allows it to become more akin to the envelope
of eistential being. /ulture masuerades itself as a kind of totaliation which is
necessary and thus not evil. Aurvival and reproduction were, until recently, the entire
pro3ect of humanity. Ironically, it is these twin goals of our species and more generally of
all life that now threaten themselves, because we have cast their net too narrowly, still
believing that if the species is to survive, it must only survive in the form that we know
the best. 'he ultimate 3ustification of heis comes form the addition of an historical
appendage that takes its cue mainly from the great systems of religion of the agrarian or
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archaic civiliations, the idea of a transcendental realm that not only has a human interest,
but provides the goal and destination of human life after it passes from the realm of
culture proper. lthough 3ust as cultural and historical in its genesis as is the rest of what
we grow into as children, this realm is set apart by belief due to its world-creating
capabilities. 'he source of culture is, in these systems, ultimately a non-human source.
Host convenient for social reproduction, it allows the teachers and authorities of heis to
say to their replacements that such and such is not merely disallowed, but in fact is
impossible. 'he metaphysical suasion of an edict coming from a non-human realm not
only takes the responsibility off other human beings, who may be uestioned by still
others, but states an order of nature that is cosmic and not local, and therefore unchanging
as against the vicissitudes of human history.
ll of this is well-known. +eis has been so successful up until recently because
it in fact had a monopoly on the heart and minds of its minions. nly with the resurgence
of reflective philosophy and science that had begun with the Greeks of the leandrian
and Hiletian schools some two and a half millenia ago, do we find a competing sets of
response to the whys and wherefores of the human condition. 0rais, then ,is the suite of
characteristics that surround the form of knowledge we might call 4fact4. 5% >act,
1. rests on scientific or historical authority
!. is universaliing in its truth claims
9. is apparently generaliable across cultures$. must be studied as techniues
;. less powerful than the 4social facts4 of belief
8. reproduces elite groups
#. is the source of 4cultural capital4
'hat we know 4the facts4 are also cultural constructions neither takes away from
their prestige, nor lends them the same status as beliefs. :ather, facts too have their
contets, 4galleries of meaning4 as Latour suggests, and outside these spaces they are
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mostly irrelevant. )e do not have to speak of discursivities such as uantum mechanics
to get the point here. 'he mere, and also empirical, fact that the knowledge of science and
history, philosophy and the arts must be formally studied is enough to understand the
difference. *o culture has within basic socialiation the groundwork for 4the fact4. *o
doubt much of our beliefs are based on eperiential facts of human mortality - watch for
cars before we cross the road, we tell our children, etc. - but these from a scientific and
historical perspective are merely effects, and not the facts themselves. In such a case we
would need to know about *ewtonian mechanics and what underlies it, the internal
combustion engine and its physics, the idea of friction and the social studies of drivers
and their specifically personalied vehicles and vehicular habits and tendencies. ll of
this and much more - akin to Aagan4s eample of a conscious digestive system, where if
we had to go through the comple chemical steps in our minds in order to eat we would
most certainly starve to death - would be needed to provide a serious and discursive
understanding of 4the facts4 involved in crossing the street safely. +eis dispense with all
of this, and understandably so. 5ut prais is made up of such materials from the very
beginning. 0rais as techniue is the result of knowing such facts. *ote that it is not in
the nature of the fact to provide its own dialectic, otherwise characteristics 5! and 59
would be much more difficult to reproduce, and 58 and 5# would immediately be called
into uestion. 'hat the facts of 4nature4 or of human history are less important than the
social facts of belief is not simply based on their freuency in our mundane lives. 5y far
the most of us are not philosophers or scientists, and what Achut has referred to as the
4scientific attitude4, to 3utapose it with the 4natural4 one above, is reserved for an elite few.
'hat the fact rests its relative prestige upon social contets which are often unavailable to
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many of us is the first sign that the realm of prais can also be harnessed to ideology, as
well as finding a safe haven amidst othersocial contets which subsists in 4mere4 belief.
'he form of capital which is associated with the knowledge of discourses of all kinds is
both a luury within the larger society, and waes luuriantly only within the contets
that it has made its own. 0opular culture, as a distraction from the serious business of the
reflective life, is far more omnipresent, and washes through heis as if it were not only
another part of primary socialiation, but increasingly, the largest part.
'he third form of knowledge that seeks to be archiphonemic to these first two, its
Aaussurean dialectic providing an aufheben - a bracketing and an uplifting while
preserving aspects of each - can be called historicity. +egel4s effect appears here without
his form of the dialectic. Instead, phronesis is gained when we sub3ect heis to the harsh
light of a critical prais, while at the same time not allowing the critiue to be any more
than a means for further knowledge, a vehicle for further reflection. 0hronesis, or the
practical wisdom of eperience and reflection, is more of a process than a place. It does
not rest in our consciousness in the same way as either belief or fact. /% +istoricity,
1. is anti-transcendentalist and 4relativist4
!. provides a reflective space
9. is on the way to an ethics and to authenticity
$. is one source of 4mature being4;. regains humanity in the 4world as it is4
8. holds the parado of living history
#. is both sub3ective and ob3ective
5ecause we are imbedded in a history which is both not of our own making - the
4tradition4 against which we must assert our reflective beings - and one through which our
very living on gets rewritten, the parado of living history provides the milieu in which
ethics regains its status as actuality. 5oth heis and prais demand utter action, either
obedient or critical respectively. 0hronesis, rather, demands that we stop and think about
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what we are to do. )e neither bow to tradition or to critiue for their respective sakes.
thics is always ad hoc, and in this it differs from its forma progenitor, morality. )hat is
good for one situation may not be for the net,. It is the same for persons, where the
geese and ganders of the mottled flock of humanity often have little enough to do with
one another in their specific travails and personal challenges. Gadamer4s definition of
4maturity4 contains this sense of reflection as part of reflective historical consciousness. It
is 4effective4 in the manner that it confronts the tradition, all the while knowing that
history is much more about what has been the case than who we are as individuals within
it. kin to the scientific candle, the mysterious swirl of history and society is cast sharply
in its silhouettes only when we assert our uniue combination of eperience and
knowledge in the way of their shadowed presence. ) cannot do so through either heis
or prais alone. s we have seen, the entire work of heis is to reproduce what has been
the case. >or the great length of human tenure on earth this was enough. >or our own
time, and perhaps for the previous half millenia, heis has faced the stiffest competition
from a prais bent on reshaping the world to its own needs. 2et this too is a world that
can become 4traditional4 in the sense that the architecture of modern consciousness is
partly built upon instrumental rationality, 'aylorism, and the marginal utility of
reproducing the massive margins of capital.
'hat there is in our world a constant conflict of interpretations, not only amongst
different belief systems, but within each system as it confronts the new prais,
underscores the immanent necessity of attaining the process of phronesis through
dialogue and dialectic. >or the heis of beliefs are, in turn, a% often discriminatory against
difference and can become a source of degradation and stigmata. b% local cultural
!#
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assumptions which may not hold over time and can create pockets of ignorance and
isolated insulation, and c% are the source of values, and as such cannot by themselves
occupy the ob3ective space of valuation. It is not the work of heis to dismantle itself.
uite the contrary, what is customary is the social glue that binds human beings to their
fellows and maintains some semblance of social order and function. /ontrary to many
revolutionaries, heis is not entirely bankrupt, as societies left to their own devices
provide functional space for most persons most of the time. 'he shamanic and other ritual
roles for transgendered persons in 0lains *orth merican pre-contact societies are merely
one of a thousand ethnographic eamples of this division of symbolic labor. *o, it is in
the main through aggressive culture contact and conflict that the systems of the social
fabric are unwound, the more rapidly, the more dangerously. 2et we dooccupy the period
of sudden and sometimes total cultural conflict and annihilation. 'his only further adds to
the weight of our ethical responsibility to step back from our tacit support of these
rationalied themes and motives - the effects of an uncritical prais of utility - and sub3ect
them to both an holistic prais and the eperienced wisdom of phronesis. >or prais
based only on 4the facts4 or as ideographic, a% is presumed to be true regardless of value
and hence often either lacks value or is treated as not valuable, and thus can seem
anonymous to human concerns. b% rest on a universal language (or an esoteric
interpretation% that factors out most people, and c% cannot be known as certain7 science
and history are often in conflict with one another as the latter produces the former and
also can change it. 'he ma3or problem with any prais - because it must first be learned
as if it were a techniue and thus often gives the impression that this is only what it is - is
access. Its resources are still those of elites, either intellectual or scientific. Its politics
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then, takes the latter place of the religious ideas that )eber famously said emanated from
disaffected and displaced intellectual elites in archaic societies. Har is very much a
modernist religious figure to this regard, and ngels a baptist of both critical and erotic
uality. 'he detail of the mathematical language of the sciences and its offspring such as
a statistics can be easily manipulated in the face of laypersons who know nothing of its
internal workings nor genealogy. 5eyond 4lies and damned lies4, such machinations
replace the insulation of heis by constructing a new comforts one where we are
reassured by epertise that all is well and that reality is in the hands of the people who it
best, and thus also make the claim that they know what is best for the remainder of us.
*ot really any different from the claims of traditional elders in every human tribe of lore
and history, the eperts of mass society have accredited themselves on the original model
of the priesthood, their auto-mythology that of a rationality that seeks only itself.
ven so, heis and prais are the essential ingredients for a critical and reflective
perspective which is finally embodied in its most full etent in the historicity of
phronesis. 'his a% acknowledges cultural value as its ob3ect without accepting it as its
measure. b% theoretically can become 4democratic4 but often creates aesthetic or
intellectual elites, and cE cannot be sourced from any single aspect of discourse but
envelopes all social conflicts as both empirical eventuality and as statements of ethics.
)ith phronesis, we listen to what has been the case and uestion it. )e do not accept its
cultural 3udgement as the sole mode of evaluation, nor do we accept its traditional value
hierarchies as the ones which either must be adhered to uncritically nor the ones which
must be defended at all costs. ll of us, from whatever society, are placed in the position
of saboteurs, and the 4hermeneutics of suspicion4 always begins with a shadow of a doubt.
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)e must maintain that there can be no distinctions amongst our fellow humans to this
regard, lest these new forms of critiue and reflection become the esoteric properties of
new intellectual or aesthetic elites that carry on much in the same way as did there
predecessors. 'hus pedagogy is of the utmost import to phronesis, even though teaching
and learning are part of the very core of the process which leads to practical wisdom. s
with persons, so with the sciences. no single epistemic group has a privileged space. 'he
ueen of the sciences must step down into the hive. kin to the eistential envelope of
)orld, the historicity of phronetic knowledge - that we are living history as well as living
within history - surrounds us with its massive subtlety.
'hese three forms of knowing are intimately related to )eber4s three forms of
authority. 4'raditional authority4 emanates from small scale social institutions and is the
source of both morals and mores. ge-graded and inherited, this non-rational or even
4pre-rational4 mode of thinking casts aspersion on 4the new4 in all of its alien advent. +eis
is what is created by traditional authority. as against this, the much more recent 4rational-
legal4 authority contests to the very core the value of all traditions, and historically, has
been triumphant in its symbolic conuests in almost every case. *ot that tradition simply
disappears, as it is well known that all revolutions regress into something not entirely
different from what they aimed to replace, but nevertheless the new ideas are now here to
stay, however they may be diluted. :ational-Legal authority has the history of prais as
both its hallmark and call to arms. 'he two of them have an ironic relationship, to be
sure, as prais must immediately lose its critical edge once the new order is established.
/alls for 4permanent revolution4 aside, prais hones its new tools of critiue in defense of
4the new4 and against pockets of resistance from traditional uarters, as much of the
9E
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rhetoric regarding the continued presence of science education in *orth merica is
geared towards. 5oth these forms of authority are ultimately and complacently
unreflective. 5oth are challenged by what )eber famously referred to as 4/harismatic4
authority. 'hough uite effective in traditional contets, charisma - not to mention its
degraded and false cousin, political charm - seems rather blithely ineffective in modern
rationalied spaces of power. Indeed, attempts at charisma outside the world of sports and
entertainment seemed destined to be ignored simply because we have been, along with
the world, 4disenchanted4, and are no longer willing to believe in the voice that claims
truth and assignation at once. truth claims are fine by themselves f couched in the
languages of the sciences, but these also can almost entirely be ignored, for as we have
seen, scientific facts most often have little relevance for our everyday lives and their
pedigree and connections reuire patient study to be understood in necessary and fullest
detail. /harismatic authority is not merely revolutionary but radically democratic - as
long as one is twice-born - pursues authenticity and emanates a uasi-mystical uality,
and is non-moral and pronounces a new ethics. ll religions have begun more or less like
this, and most have not survived the stern twin tests of history and world. 'hose that do,
)eber reminds us, are uickly 4routinied4 and take on many of the ualities of the
institutions that had originally sought to entirely replace. Ao while phronesis is kindred
with charisma, its authority can only be authoritative, never stating baldly that the
knowledge of practical wisdom is not only brand new - it often rests rather on a patient
and conscientious study of the history of discourses even into ancient times - but that it
ahs all the answers in a trice. 'he charisma of phronesis lies in the revolution all thinking
grasps in being thought. if not, phronesis uickly retreats into prais alone, for while the
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routiniation of charisma is an ubiuitous process in societies both modern and archaic, it
is only within the former that the radical personae of charismatic leadership is
commoditied and marginalied by the sheer inertia of rationalied institutions. 'his
inertia is defined by strategic and conscious political market and is manifested in
popularity and the consumption of fashion. Husic, television, film, clothing, even
definitions of health and love fall into the same category in our own age. 'he prais of
advertising, though such a phrase sounds vaguely heretical, consists of the 4art4 of
manipulating the process of consumption in the light of self-determination and self-
betterment. 'he tools of this kind of 4mature being4 are also theoretically democratic, the
healthier breakfast or the cleaner fuel. )hat passes for self-consciousness today has been
artfully changed into the skein of false consciousness. Learning and teaching can either
aid this process of reproduction and epansion, or they can uestion it. It is not a case of
this or that person either being 4with us or against us4. )e are all always against one
another and with one another, pending circumstance. 'he manner of most closely
reassuring that we continue to think is by engaging at all times a continuing and lucid
critiue of 4the world as it appears to be4.
ducational processes by which the three forms of knowledge interact may be
charted in the following manner, where there is at first a replacement of what has been
socialied as necessary by what claims to be 4serious4, and thence what turns out to be the
case over time, as practical wisdom that eperiences itself -as we ultimately eperience
our humanity - as its own finitude"
Hodes of 5eing +eis (custom% 0rais (applied theory% 0hronesis (practical wisdom%/hronological -
Aources" socialiation institution 4eperience4
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5ias" social control paradigm biography
spiration" reproduction accumulation 4mature being4
'emporality" apparent stasis 4progressive4 finitude
and long term and short term
'he chief weakness of eperience alone is its singularity. 'he corresponding
weakness of theory alone is its disconnect with the lives lived in social reality. 'he chief
weakness of custom alone is that it takes what is social to be too real. 2et the three of
them taken critically together can avoid these pitfalls. In keeping with the format of the
main sections of this book, we can provide an interactive classroom activity to
demonstrate the pedagogic usefulness of such a model, as well as it being an eercise
with which to dissect and eplore further the implications of such relations therein. sk
participants in the course to find eamples of the three forms of knowledge as well as the
personal location of each of these three as loci in their own learning processes. 'hat is,
each of us have aspects of our lives which remain in one or the other of these three
spaces, retaining the character of their respective forms of knowledge. simple eample
is perhaps found in a person4s religious beliefs, which have been socialied as sacred
against many comers, that may remain as heis in one4s life. r perhaps the untrammeled
belief in the success of the applied sciences, such as engineering or medecine, might state
its case from the position of prais alone. 'hen, a% trace the accomplished or pro3ected
process with each eample. b% ask how do you value the content of the loci and whyB and
c% construct more detailed categories of belief, fact, and historicity within your groups
and compare with other groups4 findings. ne eample that most of us eperience as we
age is the shift in perception of the ideal and form of love and eros. )e might begin with
the lcibiadean sense that their is a ingle soul-mate 4out there4 awaiting us, and our
destiny is to find them (heis%. 'hrough eperience we find that love is ambiguous in all
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of its forms (prais%, and finally we come to know love as it is, as differential and diffuse
(phronesis%.
It remains to conclude this opening chapter by stating some of the pedagogic
reasons that lie at the heart of the proposed hermeneutic circle of learning and thinking.
ne might do no better than to reiterate what I generally ask of my students within each
course I teach. *ietsche once said that the true teacher takes nothing seriously unless it
is in reference to his students - even himself. 0erhaps this is true of the ideal teacher.
0erhaps also, however, it is not necessary to completely embody this ideal to be a good
teacher, even an ecellent pedagogue - one who studies the art and theory of teaching. ll
of us are aspects of the embodiment of a great teacher, and that teacher is the community
that can take place when we are thrown into this or that classroom together, often as
strangers, and often for a brief period of time. 'his teacher, the sum of all of our parts,
creates a learning process which is, as the old adage has it, more than such a sum. 'his is
the teacher that I wish help to construct and learn from with the further help of each of
you each day we meet.
fter eighteen years as a university professor in one guise or other, I have begun
to realie that what is called higher education in *orth merica has not and is not living
up to its billing as the uniue center of thought and space of ideas for our many cultures.
'here is a lengthy list of famous critiues of both these ideals and the spaces in which
they are supposed to inhabit. In fact, this list begins as soon as the modern mass
education system begins, as soon as the modern university system begins, that is, in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. 'his is not the place for a recantation of such
critiues, but suffice to say that as soon as the noble ideas of learning, passions of
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knowledge, and arts and sciences of humanity and nature came together in an institutional
setting, some have reflected that perhaps this was not the best place of rest for them.
thers have even suggested that it is a fitting final resting place, that in fact such
knowledge, passions, and ideas are indeed at rest in the graves of academe.
+ow could such a critiue withstand the sheer inertia of a system which now
numbers, for eample, in the Dnited Atates alone, some 99EE colleges and universities,
public and private, with hundreds of thousands of successful graduates to speak for itB
>or critics like Gatto it is, in the main, because higher education repeats and reproduces
to a large etent the ways of learning that elementary and secondary institutions
prevaricate on their captive audiences. +e also suggests that many members of these
audiences, although still a minority, are convinced that their education is important
enough to continue in a similar system - but this time, by paying their own way - and
enough still of these latter are further convinced to progress to an even higher echelon
and complete divers and sundry graduate degrees. 'o what end, one may askB :obert
Lynd asked such a uestion in 19, but directed it not merely to knowledge producing
institutions but to an entire society. 'he most immediate reply came two years later when
liberal democracies were engulfed in a do or die struggle with dangerous forms of
fascism. )ell, this is one response, and of course knowledge in defense of the free access
to knowledge and history is one of educationJs most important tasks. 2et a true global
crisis in this sense is a rare task, upon which we are fortunately seldom called upon to act.
'hat we are currently engaged in an ongoing crisis regarding environment and
geopolitical competition reminds us that the need for reflection and critiue, of conscious
action and interpretation is never distant. 'here are yet more imminent responses to the
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uestion, Kknowledge for whatBJ, and it is to some of these which I would like the
learning community of which I spoke above to turn.
0erhaps much of what is taught in university classrooms, no matter the sub3ect
discipline, could be more truly called information, rather than knowledge. 'he former is
in many ways passive, descriptive, - Kmatter of factJ, if you will - and is taught in a
transmissive environment. 'he student comes to class, sits down in rows, takes notes for
an hour from overheads or other presentation technologies, and then must study and
regurgitate such information on Kob3ectiveJ eams in order to receive a grade and credit
for the class. K5anking educationJ, as 0aulo >riere calls it, and advisedly? fter many
years of this or something like it, the unfortunate effect on the learner is to create a
student who is more than content to come to class, sit back and listen, perhaps take notes,
and study for eams.iAurely it is up to the professor to be responsible for my learning?M,
this student suggests, and believes it. 0erhaps not. 'here have been a number of famous
studies on eam learning which suggest that such information is forgotten soon after the
test for it has concluded, and there is only one professional discipline that I can think of
where such a process could be beneficial. 'his is law, simply because the attorney must
have every detail of a case at her fingertips for a short time and then completely forget
about it and move on to the net case as it comes. *ow, in the natural sciences,
transmissive pedagogy can be forgiven given that these disciplines reuire often much
substantive learning of techniue and technicality before moving on with the eamination
of the cosmos. 2et even here, the greatest of our scientists have been thinkers first, and
technicians a long way second.
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It is not so much transmission of information in the classroom that is the problem
in itself. It is rather the kind of learning space, and most importantly, the kind of learner
that such helps to create. nd by no means can we discretely pro3ect disdain on an
education system which is surrounded by a passive consumer society that reproduces
itself by schooling each generation to be, more than anything else, passive producers and
consumers who do not reflect on the human condition, and are often forced to struggle
within an economic system which also reproduces both great privilege and poverty. 'he
original public school classroom was often a place of great disorder, but its ideals were of
a militaristic regimen. 'he advent of large scale consumption of media, most eminently
through the television, has ended a need for physical coercion in most educational
settings. /lassrooms which mimic the passivity of watching television, and drugs such as
ritalin to smooth out the margins of the classroom, have proven an effective combination
of deterrents against active learning and thinking. Learning becomes a form of
entertainment, eperiences are vicarious and gratificatory in the short term, thence
forgotten. In fact, learning begins to mirror the hedonistic, and yet perhaps ironically
neurotic, larger social pursuit of instant gratification.
/ommenting on such shallow events, @ewey describes some of their effects"
'raditional education offers a plethora of eamples of eperiences of
the kind 3ust mentioned. < = +ow many students, for eample, were rendered
callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in
which learning was eperienced by them. +ow many acuired special skills bymeans of automatic drill so that their power of 3udgement and capacity to act
intelligently in new situations was limitedB +ow many came to associate the
learning process with ennui and boredomB +ow many found what they did learn
was so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them nopower of control over the latterB (19C"!8-#%.
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'hat is indeed the plan, though it be no conscious conspiracy. 'he less power of
learned 3udgement, the less of what Gadamer calls Khistorical consciousnessJ, the less
thought in general within the larger society the better, the more convenient, the less
troubling for all those who benefit from contemporary social and economic organiation.
I say, Kall thoseJ, but we can probably fit such angels on the head of a pin relative to the
population as a whole. :obert HertonJs famous uestion, Kwho benefitsBJ is one which
each of us within the modern classroom could well stand to pause for, instead of rushing
headlong into a frenied race to make sure that you or I become one of the privileged few
at the epense of our colleagues in the other rows.
5ourdieu suggests, however, the university presents to us, at the same time it aids
the reproduction of society, a relatively autonomous, officially organied space where one
is actually free to think and share. 'his is the only such space that society offers us. It is
well known that revolutions in consciousness often fail due to lack of organiation of the
interested, curious, and imaginative. +ere then is an institutional space offering itself to
us for that very purpose. )e are ethically culpable when we do not seie such an
opportunity to think and create given that by far the remainder of our fellow humans
around the world will never get the chance. community of learning, a shared pedagogy
of dialogue and discussion can open up the space of thinking once again. Hy ideal
classroom is one in which we learn from one another, use as many of the resources and
life eperience each of you brings to the course, study and work cooperatively, and
evaluate as non-competitively as possible. *or is this to turn the classroom into a political
space. 'hinking itself is revolutionary. s Gadamer suggests, eperience can only be new
when it asserts itself against the known as something new, or in a new way.
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If then education serves to undermine democracy, to protect us from it, then
democracy in its turn must defend against this continuous sorting out of potential lives in
a manner which must also preclude the complete destruction of democracy. Suffice here
to say that it is by a strategically though not fully conscious socialization of a series of
graduated misrecognitions of a complex of interconnected and mutually necessary
'cultural arbitraries', that children become not who they are - although this may
sometimes occur in not a 'specially gifted child', but one in which another series of
cultural arbitraries has 'backfired', as it were, and has produced rather than reproduced.
But what the 'system' needs to tender its own future; to make itself into itself again and
again. As such, at least we have one concept of the future, but one which the past is the
future once more, in an eternal recurrence of the same. Hence competition to get out of
the way of a democracy which has engendered its reproduction through competition is a
nigh on perfect manner of ensuring not only that the system gets reproduced intact, with
all and in tact, but more importantly that that system is the generator and catalyst for all
the other societal parts. Now what of the balancing weight to this self-serving and self-
servicing understanding? Democracy then must be the promise of a better life by self-
participation in the only game in town, that of democracy's alter agent, education. But as
education, as we have seen, is but a promise of competition and struggle for ever
decreasing reward and is intensely anti-democratic in process and practice, whatever it be
in rhetorical ideals (another major part of the argument of misrepresentation of
arbitrariness, and the naturalization of ideological tropes), there seems to be an alternate
appeal on the one hand to democracy to give us the chance at a 'better life' by allowing us
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the potential to better ourselves in the educative struggle, and on the other hand back to
education itself to save us from the threat of commonness.
What is fatal about this irony is not so much that such a cultural arbitrary exists
but that it seems like it is natural, necessary, and the only game in town. This is neither
democratic nor educational. Yet it is both in an unholy amalgam to which we can suggest
that all our best efforts at genealogizing and decentering should be put to work. How this
might be done is by paying more intimate attention to all the things we think we want and
think we get out of both of these somewhat devious and deviating concepts. What we get
at least on the surface, to rephrase a little what is already fully implicated in the above, is
a chance to compete first - a chance to win at the expense of others, and a chance to fail
as the fodder for others' success. Instead, I would like to share with you a classroom
which is a world, and the world as a classroom. 'his course and our learning within
reasonable bounds of the sub3ects at hand will be perhaps less didactic, structured,
formal, competitive, and boring than many you may previously have eperienced. 2ou
may be chagrined, surprised, annoyed, lost and frustrated by this at various times
throughout the term. I am committed to your learning and maturity of thought, and I am
merely asking you to do the same for yourself and for the community at large, which is
us. )e are all ensconced in the education system for a reason. I am asking each of you,
for a brief period of time - and hopefully thence for a lifetime - to eschew the material
and logistical motives which may have brought you here.. 'hat is, I wish to begin to
construct with you as a cooperative community of learners a sense of wonder at the
cosmos, a sense of compassion for the human condition, a curiosity for the knowable and
an imagination for the unknown, and most of all, a passion for knowledge.
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!. +eis - what students bring to overcome
Hake yourself only once acuainted with the pedagogical literature of this
present7 in him there is nothing more to corrupt, who with this study is not horrifiedconcerning the highest of all poverty of the spirit and concerning a truly clumsy circle
dance. +ere our philosophy must begin not with wonder, but with horror" )homever it is
not able to bring to horror is asked to leave his hands from pedagogical things. (*ietsche!EE$"$!
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grandest of scales. ducation systems within each of these entities aid and abet such
purposes. Indeed, if developed countries maintain global control, they might even suggest
to that self-same that they do so because they have the right way of thinking, the best way
of doing things, the most mature societies known to humankind. If 4they4 wish to be like
4us4, as so many others seems to do in their official roles as emerging states themselves,
then it mustbe the case that we are the most worthy of emulation on all fronts. 2et we
know that, 3ust like our situation at home, governments seldom represent the widest of
interests with regard to the citienry. 'his is all the more the case in emerging economies
within the 4developing4 world. 4@eveloping4 into whatB, we may well ask. t the same
time, we are also aware that the intense forces of globaliation are in fact creating a kind
of world-space - once again, if metonymied into an ontology (a common humanity
based on the ideology of want, say% then a fraudulent totaliation and hence 4evil4 - where
shared values and goals are suppos