loewen hermeneutic pedagogy

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

loewen hermeneutic pedagogy

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